Block access before users accept Privacy Policy

Your Use Case 🤔

Imagine you’re an IT company, famous for groundbreaking new Apps about data privacy. For your daily doing, you’re using Jira to share information and manage your projects. Of course, it is important that corporate strategies remain secret and are not shared externally. So, your Jira users must understand the privacy policy of your instance and agree to it before accessing the platform.

Solution 💡

With our Announcer module in the Data Protection and Security Toolkit for Jira, you can easily display the privacy policy and block the login form until users provide their consent. Once a user agrees to the policy, they will be authorized to access the Jira instance. If the privacy policy is not accepted, the user will not be able to log into Jira.

We will start our how-to-guide with directly in the Announcer module. For information on configuring the app, please refer to our Admin Guide.

Step 1: View Announcer Dashboard

From your Jira Dashboard, navigate to the Manage Apps tab and to the Data Protection and Security Toolkit section. Find the Announcer button, click on it, and you will see the Announcer dashboard. It is the main page where administrators can view and manage all announcements.

Step 2: Create the announcement

You can create an announcement from scratch yourself or, whichever is more appropriate in your case, you can simply use our Privacy Policy template. Click on Templates > Privacy Policy > Use template.

Please note! The template is intended as an inspiration and is not designed to fully comply with any data protection law or specific requirements.

Step 3: Configure the announcement

Now, you’ll see the configuration page of your Jira announcement, including the preview of it.

This page consists of 4 configuration options: General, Styling, Scope and Review, which we will now modify one by one.

Step 3.1: Change general information

Pick a clear name for your template and a description. Here, for example, we can use: “Block access before users accept Privacy Policy”. The template name is the internal name that will only be displayed for admins. The Dialog title will be displayed to the user group you define.

In the dialog box, you now have all the options to add your exact privacy policy to your development project. Tell your Jira users of the development project that the information must not be shared under any circumstances. Not even within the company.

Inside the dialog body you can change the font size, format, add emojis, or even images, change the background and much more. Clicking preview will show you how the announcement will finally look like.

You can also choose whether you want to perform your customizations in the text editor or directly in HTML.

By clicking on Next, you will be navigated to the Styling options.

Step 3.2: Change styling

In the styling configurations of your Jira announcement for your development project, you can decide where the announcement should be placed and how large.

In our case, because we want to prevent anyone from accessing the whole Jira instance without confirming the privacy policy, you pick either "Block login form" or "Pin to footer and blog login form". With these two options, you can display the Jira announcement even to users that aren’t already logged in. And if they decline, the log in will be blogged.

You can add up to two buttons and change the texts for Accept and Decline to your liking.

If you select one button in the button count, it means it is required. If you pick 2 buttons, it means it is optional, what is what we require here.

By clicking on Next, you will be navigated to the Scope options.

Step 3.3: Change the scope of your announcement

Now, you can define the scope of your Jira announcement and define in which projects the announcement should be displayed to which user groups.

Skip Select projects since you want to display it everywhere in Jira
Can view > Anonymous users
1. The “Anonymous users” option is what we need here. It provides you the possibility to show the privacy notification to anyone who has access to your Jira instance.
Select the display framing time > always

By clicking on Next, you will be navigated to the Review.

Step 3.4: Review

In the last step of your Jira announcement configuration, you can review your work and have also the preview next to the configuration. If you set the status of the announcement to Enabled, it will be activated right after you hit Save. If you click Disabled, you need to enable it later.

Click on Save and you’re done!

Analyze the announcement

Now, your announcement will be displayed like this when Jira users want to login.

As you can see, a user must accept the privacy policy before the login. If they decline the announcement, the login will be blogged.