Sensitive Data Occlusion In iOS Apps
In this section, we focus on how to handle sensitive data within your iOS application using UXCam’s features to ensure privacy compliance. It is essential to occlude sensitive information to protect user data like passwords, credit card numbers, or any other Personally Identifiable Information (PII).
UXCam ensures that as a controller you can use our platform and fulfil your obligations under GDPR. However, if you collect any PII data in your app such as email address, phone, or credit card number you should use our API to hide it.
iOS - SwiftUI Differences
This article covers both SDK's occlusion approaches, which are mostly identical, you can check the snippet examples depending on the SDK you use.
You can choose to hide:
- Texts: when you only collect PII data with text fields
- Screen Views: when you need to hide a specific section of your screen.
- Screens: when you need to hide the whole screen, e.g. payment screen.
Sensitive information will be hidden under red boxes or blurred screens on the device before rendering the video and therefore never sent to UXCam. Make sure that all this info is hidden before releasing your app to production to make sure your users’ PII is never recorded.
Please keep in mind that when hiding sensitive information you can still record gestures for that view or screen, however, if you’re hiding passwords or keywords you should enable the option to hide gestures as well.
Are there any elements occluded right out of the box?
iOS:
- Occlusion of textfields based on
UITextContentType
property, if the textfield has any ofpassword
,creditcardnumber
,newpassword
oronetimecode
it will be occluded by default, regardless of if it's shown at some point in the app.
SwiftUI: any text input tagged with uxcam-occlude
or <input type="password">
is occluded.
Add Occlusions Directly From Your Dashboard:
You can now add occlusion rules to your app directly from your dashboard. Simply go into your app's settings in your dashboard and enable the rules you need, below is a breakdown of how to take full advantage of this feature, without having to resort to adding additional code in your app for most scenarios:
Occlude All Screens from Dashboard
From your app's settings in the UXCam dashboard, you'll see the video recording privacy section, from there, you'll see the first option to either record, occlude or blur all screens in your app.
Screen Specific Occlusion Rules from Dashboard
You can also customise which screens you want to apply occlusion rules to, and can create multiple rules, for example, blurring a particular screen but occluding others:
Occlude Text Input Fields from Dashboard
You can also choose to occlude all text input fields on a specific or multiple screens by simply checking the option and selecting the screens you'd like to occlude the text inputs in.
Additionally, you can opt to record gestures on all blurred/occluded screens by toggling on the option
Occlusion priority:
- Screen specific overlay from Dashboard
- Screen specific blur from Dashboard
- Global blur/overlay from Dashboard that is applied to all screens
- Screen specific Overlay from SDK
- Screen specific Blur from SDK
- Global blur/overlay from SDK that is applied to all screens
- Global blur/overlay from SDK that has Record exception screens
Limitations:
- Hiding sensitive Views needs to be handled from code (see here)
Occlusion Setup from SDK Code
If you desire to manually handle occlusions in your app or occlude specific views instead of entire screens, read below for guidance on how to set it up.
Occlude The Entire Screen with Overlay
You can configure different overlay options with the following:
let overlay = UXCamOverlaySetting(color: .yellow)
UXCam.applyOcclusion(overlay)
UXCam.removeOcclusion() // This removes all manual occlusion
UXCam.removeOcclusion(of: .overlay) // This removes manual occlusion of type overlay
let overlay = OverlaySetting()
// To apply at any point without considering screen
UXCamCore.applyOcclusion(overlay)
// To stop the occlusion that was applied before
UXCamCore.removeOcclusion()
Available overlay options are:
withoutGesture(boolean withoutGesture) || hideGestures(boolean hideGestures)
Allows the user to configure wether to capture gesture in the occluded screen or not. Passing in false to this method tells the SDK to capture gestures. Default is true, so by default the gestures are not captured.
screens(List < String > screens)
- Use it in the configuration object
Allows you to define the screens where the overlay is to either be applied or not, depending on the value passed to excludeMentionedScreens(boolean excludeMentionedScreens).
By default, if no screens are passed, the overlay is applied to all the screens unless explicitly removed. This acts as a global setting and will override all other occlusion settings defined for all screens. The occlusion must be removed to revert this action.
If screens are passed, you have the ability to either apply overlay on the mentioned screens or to exclude the mentioned screens from being overlayed.
excludeMentionedScreens(boolean excludeMentionedScreens)
This option should be used in conjunction with screens(List < String > screens).
If the passed in value is true, it tells the SDK to exclude the mentioned screens from occlusion, while applying the occlusion to the rest of the screens in the app.
If the passed in value is false, it tells the SDK to apply occlusion only to the screens that have been passed.
Default value is false.
Blur The Entire Screen
Blur is an occlusion API that allows you to blur screen records of screens. This lets you obtain information regarding the state of the screen and user interaction, while also maintaining privacy in sensitive screens.
This is useful to set all the occlusion/Blur from one place of the application without having to set it individually in different screens.
You can configure different options using the following:
let blurSetting = UXCamBlurSetting(radius: 5)
UXCam.applyOcclusion(blurSetting)
UXCam.removeOcclusion() // This removes all manual occlusion
UXCam.removeOcclusion(of: .blur) // This removes manual occlusion of type blur
let blur = BlurSetting()
// To apply at any point without considering screen
UXCamCore.applyOcclusion(blur)
// To stop the occlusion that was applied before
UXCamCore.removeOcclusion()
Available blur options are:
blurRadius(int blurRadius)
This option allows you to define the blur radius to be used for blurring. The higher the value, the more blurred the resulting video is going to be.
withoutGesture(boolean withoutGesture) || hideGestures(boolean hideGestures)
Same as overlay. Please refer to overlay section.
screens(List < String > screens)
- Use it in the configuration object
Same as overlay. Please refer to overlay section.
excludeMentionedScreens(boolean excludeMentionedScreens)
Same as overlay. Please refer to overlay section.
Examples on blur radius property customization:
Occlude all Text Fields
Similar to the new Overlay and Blur APIs:
let hideTextfields = UXCamOccludeAllTextFields()
UXCam.applyOcclusion(hideTextfields) //To apply occlusion
UXCam.removeOcclusion() //This removes all manual occlusion
UXCam.removeOcclusion(of: .occludeAllTextFields) // This removes manual occlusion of type occlude text fields
let hide = OccludeAllTextFields()
// To apply at any point without considering screen
UXCamCore.applyOcclusion(hide)
// To stop the occlusion that was applied before
UXCamCore.removeOcclusion()
Hide Sensitive View
Use it to hide specific views with sensitive information that you don't want to record.
The API parameters are:
sensitiveView: A View object that contains sensitive information.
UXCam.occludeSensitiveView(_ sensitiveView: UIView)
uxcamOcclude() -> some View
//eg.
var body: some View
{
VStack
{
Text("Personal data: XYZ")
.uxcamOcclude()
Text("Personal data: Gestures seen")
.uxcamOcclude(blockGestures: false)
}
}
Usage from configuration object
It's also possible to pass a list of occlusions (except Sensitive View) to be applied during configuration. For example:
let configuration = UXCamConfiguration(appKey: "YourAppKey")
let blurSetting = UXCamBlurSetting(radius: 5)
let overlay = UXCamOverlaySetting(color: .yellow)
let hideTextfields = UXCamOccludeAllTextFields()
let occlusion = UXCamOcclusion()
blurSetting.hideGestures = false
occlusion.apply(blurSetting, screens: ["LoginViewController"])
occlusion.apply(hideTextfields, screens: ["LoginViewController"])
configuration.occlusion = occlusion
UXCam.optIntoSchematicRecordings()
UXCam.start(with: configuration)
//Please make sure that you have tagged your screens in SwiftUI
let blur = BlurSetting(radius: 5)
let occlusion = Occlusion()
let config = Configuration(appKey: "USER-API-KEY")
occlusion.apply(blur, screens: ["Item Detail Page"])
config.occlusion = occlusion
UXCamSwiftUI.start(with: config)
Sensitive Data Occlusion Inside WebViews
When dealing with sensitive data in WebViews, it's essential to ensure that any personal or sensitive information is properly occluded to maintain user privacy. Our guide provides step-by-step instructions on how to handle occlusion within WebViews effectively.
For more information, click the button below:
Updated 20 days ago
Excellent! You can record some test sessions and once you're finalised with occlusion, we can move onto custom events and user properties!