How to Prevent PII/PHI Exposure

Localize provides a number of ways to disable phrase ingestion to prevent the risk of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and Protected Health Information (PHI) exposure.

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User data from form fields not ingested

Any user data that is entered into a form on your website will not be brought into your Localize dashboard, so this keeps any user-entered data safe.

However, if your website displays the content that was entered back to the user (not in a form field) then it is possible that Localize will find that data. In these cases, use the methods below to prevent ingestion.

Use a Staging Site to Ingest New Phrases

It is possible to completely disable new content phrase detection by setting the Localize.initialize() option saveNewPhrases to false when in a production environment, which would fully eliminate the risk of PII/PHI or other unwanted content from reaching Localize servers.

However, this also prevents new phrases from being detected, which requires that you have a separate staging or development environment where the saveNewPhrases option is turned on - all new phrases would be detected within the staging environment with no new content detected from production.

Then while in your production environment, Localize will deliver the appropriate translations to your end users, but won't be finding new content.

Standard Localize Solutions

Use one of the following features in your Localize dashboard and/or initialization call to help block unwanted content.

Disable Phrase Detection by Domain

Use Localize’s Disable Phrase Detection by Domain functionality to define what domains phrase detection should be enabled on.

translateClasses

Configure Localize to detect and translate only content that is contained inside a <div> with a particular CSS class name (ignoring all other content on the page) by providing a list of class names in the translateClasses option in your Localize.initialize() call.

Use <var> Tags

Configure Localize to block content contained in an HTML element by using a variable in your HTML code.

notranslate Attribute

Add a notranslate attribute to key HTML elements to prevent Localize from parsing those parts of the page.

Block New Phrases by Pattern

Use Localize’s Block New Phrases by Pattern functionality to define regex patterns that, if matched, will prevent Localize from detecting the phrase.

Disable Phrase Detection by Page

Use Localize’s Disable Phrase Detection by Page functionality to define regex patterns that, if matched, will prevent Localize from detecting any phrases on that page.