User Management practices must account for the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. One of its tenets is that Users have a right to data portability.
Data portability means that a User has the right to receive their personal data in a machine-readable format.
The Control Panel’s User Management system now natively supports the export of a User’s personal data to a ZIP file for download. The data format for the files containing the data is XML.
Exporting and Downloading
To export user data,
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Go to Control Panel → Users → Users and Organizations.
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Find the User and click the Actions button (
), then click Export Personal Data.
This opens the User’s Export Personal Data screen.
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If there are no existing export processes shown, there’s only one thing to do: click the Add button (
). The tool for exporting the User’s data appears.
Figure 1: The Export Personal Data tool lets you export all or some of the User's data.
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Most of the time you want to export all the available data. Click Select Items, and all applications containing User data are selected in the UI.
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Click Export. You’re taken back to the User’s Export Personal Data screen, but now there’s an export process in the list.
Figure 2: Once User data is successfully exported, the export process is displayed in the User's Export Personal Data list.
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Download the data. Click the Actions button (
) for the process and select Download.
Examining Exported Data
So what does the exported data look like?
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<model>
<model-name>com.liferay.message.boards.model.MBMessage</model-name>
<column>
<column-name>messageId</column-name>
<column-value><![CDATA[38099]]></column-value>
</column>
<column>
<column-name>statusByUserId</column-name>
<column-value><![CDATA[38045]]></column-value>
</column>
<column>
<column-name>statusByUserName</column-name>
<column-value><![CDATA[Jane Slaughter]]></column-value>
</column>
<column>
<column-name>userId</column-name>
<column-value><![CDATA[38045]]></column-value>
</column>
<column>
<column-name>userName</column-name>
<column-value><![CDATA[Jane Slaughter]]></column-value>
</column>
<column>
<column-name>subject</column-name>
<column-value><![CDATA[Great list. I was thinking of bringing the family,...]]></column-value>
</column>
<column>
<column-name>body</column-name>
<column-value><![CDATA[<p>Great list. I was thinking of bringing the family, but I don't
actually believe humans have ever been to the moon, so I guess it
would be silly to book a trip! LOL!</p>]]></column-value>
</column>
</model>
In this example, User Jane Slaughter made a Message Boards Message post, and her
User information was recorded in the MBMessage
model’s database table.
This actually corresponds with a comment on a Blogs Entry:
Figure 3: A Comment on a blog post is User Associated Data.
Exporting User data informs Site owners and Users about how much personal data the sight may have.