Manage PII in your workspace

Dovetail has several features that help you comply with data policies and protect your customers’ data. In this guide, we cover how to protect personally identifiable information (PII) at scale with Dovetail's data anonymization, access controls, and redaction features.

Workspace admins of Enterprise workspaces can create a predictable schedule for deleting unneeded and stale PII across video/audio data in the workspace. This can be done by setting custom retention periods to data at the workspace-level and at the project-level.

When setting a custom retention period, Dovetail will auto-delete raw video in notes, but maintain any highlight, reels, or transcripts generated from the video itself.

Setting a default retention period for all data in the workspace

• To set a default workspace-level period, go to ⚙️ Settings → Data retention.

• From there, go to Data retention period and set the workspace time period.

Setting a retention period for data in a specific project

There may be projects where your team need to ensure data is deleted within a time period different to what is set at the workspace-level. This may be due to the nature of the project itself, or agreements made with their research participants.

You can enforce a data retention period at the project-level to ensure project data is deleted at the required timeframe.

• To set a project-level retention period, open a project and navigate to Project Settings (⚙️) from the Project menu.

• From there, go to Data retention and set the workspace time period for your project. You will also be able to see any upcoming deletions from this page.

Ensure that the right people have access to data all the things they need to work effectively. Workspace admins and managers can work together to implement access controls to data.

To get started, we recommend for admins to create user groups to reflect teams of people who should have the same level of access to data. From there, start adding specific user groups to folders in your workspace and assign them Full or Edit access. By doing so, every user in the group will have the same access and projects created within the folder will apply the same access settings as the folder.

For projects that require stricter access, you can lock these down further by updating the access controls within the project's settings.

Learn more about how managers can assign access to data across the workspace →

There may be times where research participants reveal private information like a password, email address, or another form of PII in a call, interview, or usability test.

Magic redact makes it easy for your team to protect participants’ privacy, with the ability to blur videos to hide faces and names, and censor sensitive information from transcripts. Encourage your team to use this feature when working on new projects so no one has to hold back valuable insights from the rest of your organization.

Redacting sensitive information from customer calls

Users with edit access to a project can remove sensitive information in a piece of raw data. This includes the ability to blur, mute audio, and hide the text shown in a transcript of a customer call, interview, or usability test.

• To redact a specific section of a video, highlight a section of text in the transcript and select Redact. From there, you can choose to blur the video, and / or censor audio and text in the transcript.

• If working with video, you can also blur an entire call to hide faces, text, and screens. To do this, click Actions (•••) in the top right corner of the video and select Blur video.