top of page

Let's Flag Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in Email

Writer: Sean FieldingSean Fielding

In a previous post, we discussed the ability to redact Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in email. This redaction process is relatively straight forward and focused on unique pattern profiles.


But what about those oddballs? Maybe a pattern that is standard but not necessarily unique. i.e. there is plenty of opportunity for a false positive. Maybe you want to know a pattern exists, but do not want to redact it immediately. No problem. Our Data Wipe apex action can handle redactions and flagging.


United Status Passports

Let's use a United States Passport as an example. The US Passport number is an alphanumeric. It starts with a character followed by 8 digits. For example, E0000734.


Next generation password provided by Information about the Next Generation U.S. Passport
Next generation password provided by Information about the Next Generation U.S. Passport

This combination (one character followed by 8 digits) provides for a unique US Passport number, but it's also a common format. E0007734 could easily reference a US Passport as it could a serial number of a part number. You, therefore, might want to flag this pattern for review rather than automatically redacting it.


Let's Flag some US Passports

First, we will create an entry in the DataWipe CMDT for the US Passport Regex Pattern.


DataWipe CMDT for US Passport Number
DataWipe CMDT for US Passport Number

We build the entry for the US Passport Number as we have for Social Security Numbers and credit cards. In the US Passport example, however, we set the Action to Flag. This indicates we will be identifying the existence of the pattern but not redacting it.


Note: The Redact Only section is left with the default since it will not apply to records with an action of flag.


Flow

Next we will add some additional steps to our DataWipe flow.


One of the outputs from the DataWipe apex action is the flag variable. In a Decision step, we can evaluate that flag value to determine if flagged DataWipe patterns were found or not.


Flagged Decision
Flagged Decision
Flagged Decision details
Flagged Decision details

Based on your specific requirements, an alternative path can be executed for these flagged records.


For example, you might want to assign the case to a Flagged Queue. Or maybe you want to store the information on the case and raise a PII Warning on the record.

bottom of page