Automatically detecting sensitive information for redaction

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Advanced Data Privacy and Protection (ADPP)

The redaction suggestions feature automatically highlights certain types of personally identifiable information (PII) within a ticket for agents with appropriate permissions. Agents can then click the highlighted PII and quickly redact it. This helps keep confidential information out of Zendesk.

This feature is similar to the ticket redaction feature. However, redaction suggestions proactively identify PII rather than rely on the agent to identify PII that needs to be redacted.

Redaction suggestions work for multiple languages. See Zendesk language support by product.

This article contains the following topics:

• About redaction suggestions
• Turning on and configuring redaction suggestions
• Redacting identified PII
• Unmarking information for redaction

Related articles:

• Redacting ticket content
• Automatically redacting credit card numbers from tickets

About redaction suggestions

The redaction suggestions feature automatically identifies the following types of PII in ticket comments:

• First name or surname
• Email address
• Address
• Credit or debit card number (including last four digits only)
• International bank account number (IBAN)
• Password
• US Social Security Number (US SSN)
• Bank account number
• Date of birth
• Driver’s license
• IP address
• Phone number

Identified PII is highlighted in orange. Admins and agents with the Redact ticket content permission can see the highlighting and redact the information.

The ticket context is important to redaction suggestions. For example, say that a date of birth is mentioned in a ticket. There must be context that the date is a date of birth, such as “DOB: 01/26/1990” or “My birthday is Jan 26, 1990”. If just a date is entered without context, then it won’t be highlighted as a redaction suggestion.

Redaction suggestions work on:

• Email
• Public comments
• Internal notes
• Content in archived or closed tickets for email, API, and webform channels
• Social messaging channels enabled through Sunshine Conversations
• Ended messaging conversations from the Agent Workspace
• AI-generated call summaries and transcripts

If you redact a Zendesk message or a message created via the Sunshine Conversations SDK, the Support ticket interface shows the redacted areas of the messaging conversation within the context of the unredacted content. From the customer side, the entire message is deleted.

Redaction events are noted in a ticket’s event log so customers can be aware data has been deleted. In addition, when you redact ticket content, a redacted_content tag is automatically added to the ticket. When you redact ticket content, this causes an update to be made on the ticket using the same channel associated with the redacted content (for example, redacting a WhatsApp comment from a ticket). This behavior can cause triggers to fire if your trigger conditions are set to look for updates on a specific channel.

If you redact content on a ticket with an AI-generated summary, the summary can be removed from the ticket by refreshing the summary or closing and reopening the Agent Workspace tab. The summary is immediately removed from Zendesk's systems when a redaction is performed on a ticket, but the summary continues to appear in the browser until the page is reloaded.

Note: Due to potential conflicts, this feature shouldn't be used at the same time as the automatic credit card redaction feature.

Redaction suggestion limitations

Redaction suggestions don’t work on:

• Ticket subjects
• Messages in an active messaging conversation
• Messages stored in the Answer Bot service
• Channel framework-enabled tickets
• Ticket comments created from Mobile SDK, including those submitted through Zendesk's native support apps
• Tickets created from Slack Business Connect
• Slack side conversations
• Content in archived or closed tickets for messaging channels

Additional limitations include:

• When you redact a ticket comment sent from an email channel, Zendesk does not redact the content of the original email in the email provider's channel (such as Gmail or Yahoo). Only the text hosted in Zendesk is redacted.
• When redacting a ticket, the underlying conversation is not edited on the social messaging platform and third-party integrations. It is redacted only within Zendesk-controlled systems. This also means that an end user, depending on how they communicate with your agent, may still see unredacted content themselves when accessing a message through different channels (for example, in Facebook Messenger).
• Redaction of messages exchanged between Answer Bot and end users is not supported.
• If triggers are configured before redaction, redacted content may persist in the channels launched by these triggers (for example, email conversations).
• Bulk redaction is supported on a comment level, but not on the ticket level.

Turning on and configuring redaction suggestions

Admins can turn redaction suggestions on or off in Admin Center. By default, this feature is turned off. Admins can also configure which types of PII the feature should detect, as well as whether detected PII is highlighted in tickets for agents to see.

PII is detected only after you turn on redaction suggestions for that specific PII type. PII cannot be detected retroactively. For example, an email address in a ticket comment would be detected only after you’ve already turned on PII detection for email addresses. Any email addresses included in comments that happened before you activated the setting would not be detected.

To turn on and configure redaction suggestions

1. In Admin Center, click Account in the sidebar, then select Security > Redaction suggestions.
2. Under Choose which types of PII to suggest for redaction, select the types of PII you want redaction suggestions to automatically detect.
3. Under Select when agents should see suggestions, select one of the following options:
   • Show suggestions in ticket comment and redaction editor. Agents will see highlighted PII when they’re working in tickets and when they open the redaction editor.
   • Show suggestions in redaction editor only. Agents will see highlighted PII only when they open the redaction editor.
4. Click Save.

   

Redacting identified PII

Important: Ticket redaction cannot be reversed. Use caution when marking content for redaction.

Admins and agents with the Redact ticket content permission can take action on redaction suggestions. You can delete a single piece of identified PII, all PII within a single ticket comment, or all PII within an entire ticket at the same time.

To redact a single piece of identified PII

1. Within a ticket comment, click a redaction suggestion (text highlighted in orange).

   

2. (Optional) If you need to use the PII before redacting it, click the Copy icon () to copy the highlighted information to your clipboard so that you can quickly paste it into another system or workflow as needed.
3. Click Redact <PII type> to redact the highlighted item immediately, or click the pencil icon () to open the redaction editor. In the redaction editor, the PII highlighting is preserved, and you can also manually select and redact additional information from the comment. For more information on working with the redaction editor, see Redacting ticket content.

The piece of redacted content is obscured with a black bar.

To redact all identified PII within a single ticket comment

1. Find the ticket comment that you want to redact all PII from.
2. Click the options menu () on the right side of the comment.
3. Select Redact highlighted text to redact all highlighted items immediately, or click Mark text for redaction to open the redaction editor. In the redaction editor, the PII highlighting is preserved, and you can also manually select and redact additional information from the comment. For more information on working with the redaction editor, see Redacting ticket content.

   

All identified PII in the ticket comment is obscured with a black bar.

To redact all identified PII within an entire ticket

1. Find the ticket that you want to redact all PII from.
2. Click the options menu () on the right side of the ticket.
3. Select Redact all highlights.

   

4. In the confirmation window that appears, click Redact highlights.

   

   After a few moments, all highlighted items are redacted. This action cannot be undone.

Unmarking information for redaction

If a piece of highlighted information doesn't need to be redacted (for example, if it's not actually PII), you can unmark it for redaction. This removes the highlighting.

To unmark information for redaction

1. Within a ticket comment, click a redaction suggestion (text highlighted in orange).
2. Click the Ignore (X) icon.

   

The information is no longer highlighted.

Tip: If you accidentally unmark information for redaction that actually needs to be redacted, you can always open the redaction editor to redact it from there.