Masking User Emails/Contact Info

Support
1

Does Discourse have the ability to mask a user’s contact information when they make it public? In other words, if a user shares their email address or phone number in a public topic, what are the best practices to ensure we 1. Resolve the customer’s question and 2. Protect their information.

3

I suppose you could use corresponding regexes in watched words, but phone numbers might be more difficult to detect.
It will trigger watched words even if the email adress or phone number isn’t theirs.

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4

There’s not just a setting I’m missing that protects or prevents users from posting PII?

6

Its funny, this was triaged by our experimental AI moderator:

The image is a screenshot of a chat showing a user asking about privacy protection settings and a bot's recommendation to check for built-in features to prevent users from posting personally identifiable information. (Captioned by AI)
The image is a screenshot of a chat showing a user asking about privacy protection settings and a bot's recommendation to check for built-in features to prevent users from posting personally identifiable information. (Captioned by AI)507×311 32.8 KB

So here I am responding as instructed by the robot :stuck_out_tongue:

The answer is yes, this is built in provided you configure everything just right.

  1. You need an LLM that can confidently do the detection’
  2. You need to battle test a persona for detection
  3. Once you have a battle tested persona you can either use it to triage and flag

Regarding “edit out PII” , this is somewhat risky, cause once you start mucking with peoples words they tend to get upset. My recommendation would be to start with flagging.

Alternatively for some very rudimentary setting you could “ban” entering emails at all using watched words and a regex, but that is somewhat messy and will not be super reliable.

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