How to anonymize content of specific projects in Jira

As Jira Admin, you surely know the problem:

After a certain period of time, the content of specific issues or whole projects should be anonymized for all users. Especially working councils are often affected by such cases. That's why a tool that allows such a large operation with just a few clicks and also completely automatically would be an immense added value.

After all, if you delete issues or a complete project, you also lose the editing history. So, a way must be found to be privacy compliant on the road, but also to ensure traceability within a company.

Data Protection and Security Toolkit for Jira's Data Cleaner module is perfect for this task. With it, you can easily meet all these requirements.

In this step-by-step guide, we will show you how to easily anonymize specific areas in Jira.

Step-by-step guide on how to anonymize content of specific projects in Jira

Step 1: Navigate to the Data Cleaner Dashboad and click on the section “Anonymize Tickets”.

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Step 2: Now, you’ll see this screen:

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Here you can choose whether you want to search for data first or anonymize it directly. We recommend searching for the data and then anonymizing it in the next step. This gives you an additional security.

Step 3: Now we choose a target user. Later we will replace all found users in the project area with this one. This is necessary because in Jira it is not possible for a ticket to exist without a reporter. In order to have the information anonymized, we create an imaginary user without personal data that replaces the real users. We name our target user "user_for_anonymziation".

Step 4: In the next step, we define the scope or object we want to anonymize. Here you are also free to filter for already defined projects. You can search for one or more projects at once. With JQL, you enter your specific filters in the search box.

Step 5: Now your selection is viewed again. By clicking on "Search", the selection of tickets and the possible anonymization will be displayed (without it being performed already now).

By default, the "Issue Fields" checkbox is enabled. This means that all content related to the tickets will be anonymized.

Step 6: In the history, you will now see all related objects that are taken into account during anonymization.

Step 7: If you are satisfied with the selection, you can repeat the previous steps. To do this, click the "Anonymize Tickets" button again, but select "Anonymize data." instead of "Search for Data."

Enter the same filters and the real users will be replaced with the special imaginary user.

Step 8: You can see that the anonymization was successful by the status "Anonymized", which will then appear in the history.

Now you can see in the columns exactly which content was replaced. Congratulations on the successful anonymization!