Space anonymization before export with GDPR in Confluence
How to export a Confluence space without user data
As a Confluence Admin, sooner or later, the time comes that you want to migrate a space or share it with someone. However, you don't always want to make the sensitive user data visible to everyone. If you export a space just like that from one Confluence account to the next, all user data like authors or comments will be transferred as well.
But we offer you a quick and easy solution to anonymize the user data before exporting it, so you can work with content without references to real users.
In this step-by-step guide, we will show you how to use our Data Protection and Security Toolkit to do so.
Anonymize a complete space before the export in Confluence: step-by-step
Before you start anonymizing, you should be aware that anonymizing a space is an irreversible process. So if you want to share a space with someone that you still want to use, you should first copy your space or export your data to a temporary space and anonymize it there.
To copy or rename a space in Confluence, you can use this Atlassian guide. It explains three approaches in detail.
You can:
Use an app from the Marketplace
Use the feature copy page hierarchy
Export the space and modify the XML code
If you have done one of the steps and your data is now safe, you can start anonymizing your space.
1. Create a dummy user
When anonymizing the space, we will replace the corresponding users with a dummy user. Either you already have a fictional user for such purposes, or you create one.
To do this, navigate to Add Users in the User module and type some Username in. In our example, we use the name Anonymized User.
This user behaves like a real user, but does not have any information. So it’s perfect for our purpose.
2. Anonymize a complete Confluence space
Step 1: Go to the Data Cleaner Dashboard and select the Anonymize Content module.
Step 2: Enable Search for data and then click on Continue. We recommend to search for the user data first and not to anonymize them directly, because, as already mentioned, this process cannot be undone.
Step 3: Choose the dummy user you just created as target user for the upcoming anonymization.
Step 4: Define the scope you want to search for.
Step 5: Here, you can see a preview of the following search. Click on Search to start the process.
Step 6: When your search is finished, you will see a search result that may look something like the following.
Step 7: Once you have looked at your results in detail, and you are sure that you want to use this data and not change something in the scope, you can now anonymize this data. To do this, go back to the Data Cleaner overview page and select the Anonymize Content module. Here, you activate Anonymize data and click Continue.
Step 8: Proceed as in step 3.3 (choose target user) and step 3.4 (define the scope). Then, agree that you’re sure about this irreversible process and click on Anonymize.
Step 9: After the anonymization is complete, the status of your search results changes from Found to Anonymized.
Now your complete space is free of personal real user data, and you can freely share or edit it as you like!
If you want to import your space into another Confluence site, it is important that you have System Administrator rights. You will need them to successfully restore the XML file. You can simply use this Atlassian space recovery guide to safely import all data files.
If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.