Title: Randomness
Last modified: March 18, 2018

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# Randomness

 *  [nathanwright](https://wordpress.org/support/users/nathanwright/)
 * (@nathanwright)
 * [8 years, 2 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/randomness/)
 * Hi Sean
 * Me again!!
 * I have looked through your code and it is very clean and appears to be well written.
 * One thing I wanted to see was how you were generating the random part to anonymise
   the data subject and see that you have a function called generate_random_string
   which generates the random information and based on a 30 character string.
 * I have attended a number of different conferences and seminars where the anonymising
   of the data subjects identifiable information was discussed in detail and if 
   the randomness is really good enough for anonymising the data subject and the
   general view was that it needs to be more robust than a loop with a sequence 
   of characters in alphanumeric order. I would suggest that you might consider 
   doing a few things to make it more random. Firstly change the sequence of the
   30 characters so that the order is random and when generating the random include
   a random millisecond delay before each random character is generated and also
   when it is selected. This way it makes it far more difficult to unravel the randomness(
   or rather lack of randomness) when using your current method and therefore much
   harder to break if the data was breached. It also shows a Supervisory Authority
   and a concerted effort has been made to really anonymise the data subjects identifiable
   information.
 * You might also (in the Pro version) want to consider moving the report generation
   part to be part of a cronjob rather than realtime as I would imagine in future(
   in the Pro version) you plan to make the plugin work with other plugins that 
   store personally identifiable information etc and this could put a load and delay
   other processed on a very busy server.
 * Also you appear to be reading the content for the email from files in the mail
   folder which you might want to consider moving to the settings page so that they
   can be edited by the data controller and also you may want to consider moving
   these from being stored in files to be stored in the WP database itself.
 * In addition you might want to consider adding a cronjob that runs once a day 
   and checks to see if any new meta keys have been added to the users table as 
   at the moment it is only as good as when you configured the plugin which could
   give a false sense of security. There should be an option to be able to send 
   an email with information to the data controller / IT to inform them that they
   need to review the settings page in your plugin to check if any new meta key 
   data needs to be included for your plugin to handle it in the eraser process.
 * Finally, you might want to consider the addition of an export option in the logs
   panel and also the option to email the data controller the logs each day as this
   would be useful for the data controller to store to evidence to a Supervisory
   Authority that they are taking a proactive course of action regarding the GDPR.
 * Best wishes
 * Nathan

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)

 *  Plugin Author [willowsconsulting](https://wordpress.org/support/users/willowsconsulting/)
 * (@willowsconsulting)
 * [8 years, 2 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/randomness/#post-10094416)
 * Hi Nathan,
 * thanks for all your suggestions. We will look into the anonymization process 
   and try to improve it as per your comments.
    I am adding all your other suggestions
   as feature requests for either the free or pro version. Most of them should not
   be difficult to implement.
 * Thanks again for all your feedback,
    Wojtek

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)

The topic ‘Randomness’ is closed to new replies.

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 * 1 reply
 * 2 participants
 * Last reply from: [willowsconsulting](https://wordpress.org/support/users/willowsconsulting/)
 * Last activity: [8 years, 2 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/randomness/#post-10094416)
 * Status: not resolved