Redacting ticket content




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Redact sensitive information like credit card numbers and passwords from ticket comments and attachments to maintain security and compliance. Use the Agent Workspace to mark and remove data from email, messaging, and side conversations. Note that redaction is irreversible and doesn't affect external channels. Limitations include active chats and SMS. The redacted_content tag helps track redacted tickets.





Customers sometimes enter sensitive information such as credit card numbers, social
security numbers, passwords, attachments, or other sensitive information in tickets when they
shouldn't. In addition to being visible to anybody with access to the ticket, the sensitive
information automatically gets stored in a database with the rest of the ticket.
In the Zendesk Agent Workspace, you can use ticket redaction
to redact personal data. You don’t need to install a separate app. You must have the Agent
Workspace activated to use ticket redaction.


Tip: Customers with the Advanced Data Privacy and Protection add-on can use redaction suggestions to highlight sensitive data within ticket
comments. The add-on also allows you to create ticket triggers to redact sensitive data automatically.
This article contains the following sections:

About ticket redaction
Ticket redaction limitations
Redacting ticket content
Redacting ticket content in side
conversations

Related articles:

Automatically detecting sensitive information for redaction
Automatically redacting credit card numbers from tickets



About ticket redaction

Admins and agents in custom roles with permission can redact,
or remove, sensitive information found in ticket comments and attachments so that your
account stays secure and compliant. This helps keep confidential information out of Zendesk.
On plans without custom roles, agents with permission to delete tickets can also redact.
Ticket redaction works on:

Email
Side conversation emails, child tickets, and Microsoft Teams messages
Social messaging channels enabled through Sunshine Conversations
Web and mobile messaging
Ended chat conversations from the Agent Workspace
Public comments
Internal notes
Images (attached and inline)
Attachments (with some limitations)
Content in archived or closed tickets for messaging, email, API, and webform
channels
Tickets created through the Sunshine Conversations SDK.

Ticket redaction does not currently support redaction of entire tickets. Also,
make sure you redact all sensitive content before merging tickets:

If you redact content in the original ticket after it has been merged with another
ticket, the redacted content will be removed from the original ticket, but not from the
merged ticket.

It is not possible to redact information, including attachments, from the internal note
that is created when you merge a ticket.

Any redaction on a ticket breaks the ability to view original emails on all comments,
including those that came in before the redacted comment. The original email is also not
viewable for additional inbound email comments on that ticket. See Understanding when the original email is not viewable in
Zendesk.
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, all
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 content that was
redacted. 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.


Ticket redaction limitations

Ticket redaction does not work on:
Messages in an active chat

Ticket comments created from SMS

Translated messages. This limitation applies to all web, mobile, and social
messaging channels.

Messages stored in the Zendesk bot service and in third-party bot services

Channel framework-enabled tickets
Ticket comments created from Mobile SDK, including those submitted through Zendesk's
support apps
Tickets created from Slack Business Connect
Slack side conversations
Content in archived or closed tickets for live chat channels


Quick reply and carousel steps displayed in the Agent
Workspace ticket interface
Call summaries and transcriptions in Contact Center



Additional limitations include:


You must have a chat role to redact ticket content in chat or
messaging conversations.
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 or a 3rd-party
Chat bot.
Redaction of messages exchanged between Zendesk bots, third-party bots, and end users
is not supported.
If triggers are configured prior to redaction taking place, redacted content may
persist in the channels launched by these triggers. For example, email
conversations.
Ticket redaction for the live chat history may not be instantaneous and may be delayed
by up to 10 minutes due to database replication.
Bulk redaction is not supported.
A maximum of 75 attachments can be redacted at once.





Redacting ticket content


Important: Ticket redaction cannot be reversed. Use caution when marking content
for redaction. Also, rich text formatting in a message may be lost when redacting.
To redact ticket content

Open a ticket and scroll to the conversation thread that contains the content you want
to redact. You can only redact content in one thread at a time. Not all tickets can be
redacted. See Ticket redaction limitations.

Hover your mouse over the thread to display the options menu icon ( ).
Click the options menu icon ( ) and select Mark text for redaction.
A redaction
pane appears.

Select the content you want to redact, then click Mark for redaction. The
content you want to redact is highlighted.


Continue to select content to redact and Mark it for redaction. You can include
multiple text strings, attachments, and images as part of the same redaction.


If you mark something for redaction by
mistake, click the content and select Unmark for redaction.


When you’ve finished selecting the content you want to redact, click Redact.

The ticket is updated with the redacted
content. Ticket redaction is not reversible.

When you redact ticket content, a
redacted_content tag is automatically added to the ticket. You can search for this tag to get a list of redacted
tickets.



Note: If you have a ticket and you redact only one instance of a phrase
that appears multiple times in ticket comments, only that instance will be redacted. To keep
the phrase from being visible across multiple ticket comments, you must redact all
instances.



Redacting ticket content in side conversations


Note: You must be on a Suite Professional plan or above to use side conversations. Side
conversations are not available on Support only plans. See About side conversations.
You can also redact content in side conversations in both the Agent Workspace and the
standard agent interface. Content can be redacted on the following side conversations
channels:
Email
Microsoft Teams
Child tickets


When you redact content in a side conversation, keep in mind:
The redaction is only applied to the content in the side conversation. The content
isn't redacted on the external channels on which it was delivered, such as an email or
Microsoft Teams message.
When you redact content on a side conversation child ticket, the redaction only takes
place on the side conversation. You must separately redact the content in the child
ticket.
The redacted_content ticket tag isn't automatically added to the ticket.


Side conversation redaction in the Agent Workspace:

Side conversation redaction in the standard agent interface:




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