rails-gdpr-export

A gem for exporting user personal data in compliance with GDPR.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'rails-gdpr-export'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install rails-gdpr-export

Usage

This gem allows you to specify fields that you want to retrieve from your models and to export them in a csv format.

Initialization

First start by importing gdpr_exporter into your application, i.e., add require "gdpr_exporter" to your Application.rb file.

Data collection

In order to specify the fields you want to collect you need to call gdpr_collect. The call target is a rails model and its arguments are:

• a set of simple fields, i.e. fields that will be output as is,
• followed by a hash of params:

 { user_id:        <the field in the model used as alias for the user_id field>
   renamed_fields: { <field_from_db> => <field_name_in_output> }
   table_name:     <the new table name in output>
   description:    <a comment>
   joins:          [<an array of associations>] }

When joins is specified, the fields of an association should be defined as <association_name> <field_name>.

For user_id, you can also use a string with a chain of associations. For instance, if my model is indirectly linked to user through an belongs_to: :account association, you can specify user_id: "account user_id". Currently, the gem support only to levels of nested associations.

Example

Suppose you have a User model, then in its class you should include Gdprexporter and call gdpr_collect. And you should do something similar for all other models you are interested in in your application.

class User
    include GdprExporter

    gdpr_collect :email, :last_sign_in_at, :type, :forward_mailbox,
        "program title",
        { user_id: :id,
          renamed_fields: { sign_in_count: "sign in count",
                            current_sign_in_at: "time of current sign in",
                            chosen_program_id: "chosen program",
                            current_sign_in_ip: "current IP address",
                            last_sign_in_ip: "previously used IP address" },
          joins:          [:program] }
end

Here from your User model, you want to retrieve the values of the fields email, last_sign_in_at, type, forward_mailbox, in addition to the fields sign_in_count, current_sign_in_at, chosen_program_id, current_sign_in_ip, last_sign_in_ip. However for the latter you want their csv header to be renamed. And the field representing the user in the User model is id. User has also an association with program and you want to value of its field title (hence the presence of "program title" in the list of fields).

Data export

Finally, call GdprExporter.export(<user_id>) (from a controller in your application) to return a csv formatted output of all the fields you specified previously.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/epfl-exts/rails-gdpr-export.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.