Upcoming UpdraftPlus Premium feature: Anonymise data before cloning your site

As a WordPress user, you may have created a site with members who have been granted various levels of access other than admin; such as editor or moderator. As such, you should be aware that as the owner and admin of this site, should you attempt to clone the site and its members / level of access information, many of the details about these users is classed as ‘data’. Unless this data is handled carefully, it could result in violation of GDPR laws.

Currently, in order to comply with GDPR laws when cloning a site and user data, you need to wipe or edit all of the relevant data on the cloned site immediately after it has been created. This task can be time consuming and annoying.

UpdraftPlus has been working on a way to help administrators fix this issue. In the 2.16.47 version of UpdraftPlus onwards, when creating a backup, you will have the following different anonymisation options:

Anonymise personal data for all users except the logged in user: This option will anonymise all personal data for all users except for the user who is logged in and creating the backup.

Anonymise personal data for all users except staff: This option is the same as the first option, but anyone with the following user roles will be counted as staff and their data will not be anonymised.

The current staff user roles are:

• Administrator
• Editor
• Moderator
• Shop_manager
• Fue_manager
• Plugin_manager
• WPSEO_editor
• SEO_manager

We hope these updates will help users cloning sites, to be aware of and more easily comply with GDPR regulations.