Test the Privacy Tool Suite by Joomla

Since the beginning of May a dedicated Joomla Team have been working on a Privacy Tool Suite to help ensure compliance of your websites with privacy regulations.

We need your help to reach the next milestone! Community testing is very important in an Open Source project, like Joomla, to ensure a quality product.
Community members and extension developers, please test these new extensions in every way possible so that we can merge this Privacy Tool Suite to Joomla 3.9 and then enter the release lifecycle (alpha, beta, release candidate and stable).
If you don’t know exactly what the Privacy Tool Suite is, we encourage you to read this thread:  https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/pull/20800.

How to test and help the Project

To help you with testing we have created some simple guidelines.

First of all, download the build at https://developer.joomla.org/privacy-pack/


Install it. To access to all email features and provide better tests, we advise you to install it on a live testing server.
Feel free to also test the update packages on a copy of your production sites. The more tests we have, the better the release will be and the sooner we’ll be able to release it!

You can find some documentation (in progress) at https://docs.joomla.org/Category:Joomla!_3.9.
Don’t hesitate to click on the Help Button in your site administrator, the Help Screens are there (in progress)!

So here we go!
Here is a rough list of features you can test and give feeback on in the PR mentioned above and if you find any bugs, please open an issue on this repo: https://github.com/joomla-projects/privacy-framework.

The Privacy Component

A tutorial can be found at https://docs.joomla.org/J3.x:Privacy.

Please follow the 5 steps below to set up the Privacy Component:

  • Step 1 - Once installed, in order to display the Privacy Dashboard on your Control Panel, create and publish an Admin Module Privacy Dashboard. (Note: if you’re updating a site for your test, first, go to Extensions -> Manage to enable the module and then create it)
    Enable the Privacy / Consent related plugins.
  • Step 2 - Then, go and explore the Privacy Component by navigating to Users -> Privacy
    You’ll see a left sidebar with 4 elements: Dashboard / Requests / Capabilities / Consents.
  • Step 3 - As you can see on the Privacy Dashboard, in the Status Check module, you’ll need to create some elements: create an article for your privacy article, and create a new menu item type Create Request.
    Done? These elements should now be green on your Dashboard.
  • Step 4 - Don’t forget also to create (and test) the 2 other new menu item types: Confirm Request and Extend Consent.
  • Step 5 - Did you see that the module also informs you if there are some urgent requests to deal with? Set up the number of days to consider a request as urgent in the Options screen of the component, and Joomla will remind you when an action is needed.

Now that you’re done with these steps. Let’s play!

Create a registration form, a contact form, create users …
A checkbox for privacy consent will be automatically added to your forms by the system.

When a user consents to your privacy policy, you can see it in the Consents screen. And if you need to add an end date to your privacy consent, the system will take care of it, just apply the settings you need in the dedicated plugin!

Now, log in to the frontend of your website with the account of one of your new users. Submit an export data request, submit a removal request. You can also create an information request directly from your website administrator interface.
Check your emails, confirm (or not) the request, and go back to your website administrator to check and act on these requests (https://docs.joomla.org/Help38:Components_Privacy_Requests - https://docs.joomla.org/Help38:Components_Privacy_Request - https://docs.joomla.org/Help38:Components_Privacy_Request_Edit)

A new plugin ‘Terms & Conditions’ has been added  to make it easier to add this single field to your forms. Enable it and check this page for more information.

Capabilities

The Capabilities section includes an explanation of the features of the Privacy Component and assists with informing site owners of privacy related capability concerns and data collection. This screen will display information reported by extensions through a dedicated plugin event.

As an example, enable the Captcha - ReCaptcha Plugin and go back to the Capabilities screen. You’ll see that the capability of this plugin is now displayed on the screen.

Extension developers, you can report the capabilities of your extensions on this screen. Just follow the process mentioned in this link.

The User Actions Log Component

Go back to the control panel of your Joomla website administrator, you will see a brand new admin module called Latest Actions. It shows a list of actions performed on your website by users and administrators. (Note: if you’re updating a site for your test, first, go to Extensions -> Manage to enable the module and then create it)

This module takes its content from the Action Logs Component you can find at Users > User Actions Log. This component will keep a track of all the actions performed by your website users, recording the “action”, the “user”, the “extension” impacted and the “time” in which the action took place. Action Log items can be deleted, purged and exported as csv files by Super Users.

Please review the items in the Action Log list and “play” with the features of the component, in order to check its functionality.

In the Options of the component, you can adjust some settings like the type of events to be logged, as well as the CSV delimiter, and you can choose whether to enable or not the logging of IP addresses. By default, IP logging is disabled and recording is enabled on all the “core” events.

A Super User profile will also now show a new tab User Actions Log Options where you can enable the logging option. If enabled, the system can send you email notifications for each recorded event from those selected in the options or in the User tab.

Now you know what to do please join in and test it and give us your feedback. If you have a local Joomla User Group (JUG) why don't you get together and test it at your next meeting.