Dynamic Erasure Email integration

A Dynamic Erasure Email integration allows Fides to send a weekly email containing the identities of all the data subjects that have submitted an erasure request in the past week. Dynamic Erasure Emails can be used to notify multiple third-party vendors of their obligations to erase any personal data associated with the provided identities.

This integration is an abstraction of the Generic Erasure Email integration, where instead of setting a static email address, you must specify a reference to a dataset field that contains the email address. The email address will then be dyanmically obtained at runtime from that dataset field, using any custom request fields provided in the privacy request as context for the email lookup.

Prerequisites

Configure an email provider

In order to setup a Dynamic Erasure Email integration, you'll first need to configure an email provider. See our guide for configuring a message service.

Create a dataset with custom_request_field annotations

You'll need to have an existing dataset with a field that represents the email address of the third-party vendor, and another one that represents the vendor name. Additionally, the dataset needs to specify which fields will be provided as custom request fields in the erasure request in order to perform the email lookup.

Consider the following example in which we have a vendors table with the columns email_address, vendor_name, and site_id. The erasure requests will include a custom request field called siteId that we want to use to obtain the vendor email address. We then define our dataset as follows:

  - fides_key: example_dynamic_erasure_email_dataset
    data_categories: []
    description: Example dataset for a Dynamic Erasure Email integration
    name: Example Dynamic Erasure Email Dataset
    collections:
      - name: vendors
        fields:
          - name: email_address
            data_categories: []
            fides_meta:
              data_type: string
          - name: vendor_name
            data_categories: []
            fides_meta:
              data_type: string
          - name: site_id
            data_categories: []
            fides_meta:
              data_type: string
              custom_request_field: siteId

Notice the custom_request_field attribute in the fides_meta section of the site_id column; it tells Fides that the vendor email adress and name will need to be obtained using the siteId custom request field value as the lookup in the site_id column, generating a query of the form SELECT email_address, vendor_name FROM vendors WHERE site_id = <siteId from privacy request> to retrieve the vendor information.

Connect the dataset to the corresponding integration

The dataset we define tells Fides how to lookup the vendor email address and name, but we still need Fides to know how to connect to the data source. You'll need to either create a new integration or edit an existing one and link it to the dataset with the Dataset dropwdown. In our previous example, this could be setting up a PostgreSQL integration and selecting the example_dynamic_erasure_email_dataset in the Dataset dropdown in the integration.

Setting up a Dynamic Erasure Email integration

To set up a Dynamic Erasure Email integration:

1. Navigate to Data map → View Systems and choose the system that you want to connect.
2. Click on the Integrations tab.
3. Pick the Dynamic Erasure Email option from the Connection type drop-down menu.
4. Complete the required fields for the integration:
   • Third Party Vendor Name Field: The dataset field that contains the name of the third-party vendor. Should be a value of the form dataset_key.collection_name.field_name. The vendor name is used as part of the email body.
   • Recipient Email Address Field: The dataset field that contains the email address of the third-party vendor. Should be a value of the form dataset_key.collection_name.field_name.
5. Optionally complete the optional fields for the integration:
   • Test Email Address: An email address where you can send a test email when you click Test integration. Make sure this is an email address that you own.
6. Click Save to save your integration. If you've completed the optional Test Email Address field, you can click Test integration after saving in order to send a test email to the provided email address.