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> joins: [<an array of associations>]} When joins is specified, the fields of an association should be defined as <association_name> <field_name>.

Example

User.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]}

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.

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.