Personally identifiable information in Sparkcentral

Personally identifiable information (PII) refers to details that may be used to identify or infer the identity of an individual. Examples of PII include credit card information and Social Security numbers.

Customers sometimes unintentionally send such sensitive information in Sparkcentral. Admins can help protect this information by enabling manual message masking and automatic message masking:

• Go to Admin settings, expand Privacy and security, and then select PII handling.

Manual message masking

Manual message masking masks the full text of inbound messages that contain sensitive information, both in conversation history and in back-end storage systems. It works on all channels, public and private.

Note: Only channel supervisors can use manual message masking.

To mask a message, select the Mask option next to the message when replying, and then select Mask when prompted to confirm the action.

Important: Manual message masking cannot be undone.

All message content is replaced with asterisks (*), one for each character in the message. A message audit trail is added that says, “Message content masked by [Supervisor Name] - [timestamp]."

Automatic message masking

Automatic message masking masks unwanted or sensitive information in inbound messages when they enter Sparkcentral. Each mask is defined as a pattern that automatically replaces matching text, both in conversation history and in back-end storage systems, before it is saved and routed to agents. It works on all channels, public and private.

In messages:

• The first 12 digits of credit card numbers are replaced with Xs, like so: XXXXXXXXXXXX1234.
• The first 5 digits of US Social Security numbers are replaced with Xs, like so: XXXXX1234.

Dashes and single spaces within numbers do not affect detection or masking.

Sparkcentral automatically checks all inbound messages for credit card and Social Security numbers as follows:

• Credit card numbers - Sparkcentral uses the Luhn algorithm to determine whether a number is a credit card number or another series of numbers.

• Social Security numbers - Sparkcentral looks for a specific format: 3 digits, an optional space or dash, 2 digits, an optional space or dash, and 4 digits.