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

To initialize the gem usage, loads the GdprExporter module into activerecord classes. Do this at initialization time through an initializer. E.g. create a initializers/gdpr.rb file and add the following:

ActiveRecord::Base.send :include, GdprExporter

Data collection

In order to specify the fields you want to return to the user 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: ruby {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> join: <an association>}

Example

User.gdpr_collect :email, :last_sign_in_at, :type, :forward_mailbox,
                  {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"}}

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.

Data export

Finally, call GdprExporter.export(<user_id>) 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.