Message Redaction Supports Phone Number and Content Privacy for Sensitive Applications

Message Redaction Supports Phone Number and Content Privacy for Sensitive Applications

Customer privacy is a big deal to us at Twilio, to improve privacy in messaging applications for our customers, we offer Message Redaction, which allows the redaction of message body and the last four digits of non-Twilio phone numbers. Messaging Redaction is now Generally Available.

Many developers use our messaging APIs to create conversations, provide information or support critical experiences. For organizations delivering sensitive communications, the ability to prevent the storage of phone numbers or message content on Twilio’s servers can help to ensure the privacy of participants is maintained.

Developers building with the Twilio Customer Engagement Platform are constantly creating new and novel projects to support some of their most pressing customer engagement challenges. Since every project and application is different, organizations can choose to enable both message body and phone number redaction, or both. It all depends on what’s being built.

Getting started with Message Redaction for phone numbers and message body

Once you have Message Redaction enabled on your Twilio account, simply specify data handling preferences for the destination phone number of outgoing messages by setting AddressRetention=obfuscate. This works the same way as Message Body Redaction which you use by setting ContentRetention=discard.

You can also set the account default so that every message you send or receive through Twilio is retained with a redacted phone number. Once activated, Twilio will retain the full number only as long as required to deliver the message. Any downstream systems and services (such as long-term storage) will only have access to the redacted phone numbers. Similarly, you are able to activate Message Redaction for text content for all traffic at the account level or at the message level.

For more information on getting started with Message Redaction, reach out here. We can’t wait to see what you build!