Learn about Alchemer Pulse’s ability to redact PII and other forms of sensitive data.
Alchemer Pulse allows customers to redact Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and other types of sensitive data. This article answers common questions about how redaction works within the platform.
Can Alchemer Pulse redact PII data?
Yes, Alchemer Pulse supports PII redaction. Sensitive information is scrubbed from each piece of feedback or conversation (or transcript, in the case of voice data). For security purposes, this occurs at the very beginning of the data ingestion pipeline, and the redaction is irreversible. Once removed, the sensitive data is replaced with a designated placeholder sequence.
What types of PII does Alchemer Pulse redact?
Alchemer Pulse includes several pre-configured redaction formats:
- Email addresses
- Phone numbers
- Post Codes (UK format)
- ZIP Codes (US format)
- Credit card numbers
- Social Security Numbers (US format)
These rules can be enabled individually or in combination, across specific projects or for your entire account—including future projects.
Alchemer Pulse also supports custom redaction rules provided by customers. This is useful for identifying formats like internal User IDs, Account IDs, or region-specific PII. We typically use regular expressions for this purpose. You can either provide your own regex pattern or work with our team to develop one.
How do I enable PII redaction for my Alchemer Pulse account?
To enable PII redaction, contact our Alchemer Support. Please include the following in your request:
- Which projects you'd like redaction enabled for (e.g., all projects)
- Which PII formats you want to redact (e.g., all available formats)
Do you redact PII in comments only or metadata as well?
PII redaction described here is only relevant for redacting PII inadvertently included in the unstructured piece of feedback (or conversation transcript) itself rather than metadata. For metadata, the much more secure method is to avoid fetching data that contains PII data in the first place. This can be customized as part of the implementation/integration. Please contact Alchemer Support if you are unsure or would like to make a change.
How does PII redaction work?
During data ingestion, when a PII match is found, the relevant text is replaced with a placeholder. For example:
“My name is John and my email is john@example.com”
becomes
“My name is John and my email is [redacted]”
The redacted information is not passed to any Alchemer Pulse models, is not stored in our systems, and is not visible within the application.
