Documentation about IBM Watson® Assistant for IBM Cloud Pak® for Data has moved. For the most up-to-date version, see Securing your assistant.

Information security

IBM is committed to providing our clients and partners with innovative data privacy, security and governance solutions.

Notice: Clients are responsible for ensuring their own compliance with various laws and regulations, including the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Clients are solely responsible for obtaining advice of competent legal counsel as to the identification and interpretation of any relevant laws and regulations that may affect the clients’ business and any actions the clients may need to take to comply with such laws and regulations.

The products, services, and other capabilities described herein are not suitable for all client situations and may have restricted availability. IBM does not provide legal, accounting or auditing advice or represent or warrant that its services or products will ensure that clients are in compliance with any law or regulation.

If you need to request GDPR support for IBM Cloud® Watson resources that are created

In the European Union, see Requesting support for IBM Cloud Watson resources created in the European Union.
Outside the European Union, see Requesting support for resources outside the European Union.

1.5.0 and later Support for deleting data was added when log retention and analytics support were added to the product.

Do not add personal data to the training data (entities and intents, including user examples) that you create.

If you need to remove a customer's message data from a Watson Assistant instance, you can do so based on the customer ID of the client, as long as you associate the message with a customer ID when the message is sent to Watson Assistant.

The preview link integration does not support the labeling and therefore deletion of data based on customer ID. Do not use the preview link integration in a solution that must support the ability to delete data based on a customer ID.
For the web chat integration, the service takes the user_id that is passed in and adds it as the customer_id parameter value to the X-Watson-Metadata header with each request.

Before you begin

To be able to delete message data associated with a specific user, you must first associate all messages with a unique customer ID for each user. To specify the customer ID for any messages sent from a custom client application by using the /message API, include the X-Watson-Metadata: customer_id property in your header. For example:

curl -X POST -u "apikey:3Df... ...Y7Pc9"
 --header
   'Content-Type: application/json'
   'X-Watson-Metadata: customer_id=abc'
 --data
   '{"input":{"text":"hello"}}'
  '{url}/v2/assistants/{assistant_id}/sessions/{session_id}/message?version=2019-02-28'

where {url} is the appropriate URL for your instance. For more details, see Service endpoint.

The customer_id string cannot include the semicolon (;) or equal sign (=) characters. You are responsible for ensuring that each customer ID property is unique across your customers.

You can pass multiple customer ID values with semicolon-separated customer_id={value} pairs. For example: 'X-Watson-Metadata: customer_id=abc;customer_id=xyz'

If you add a search skill to an assistant, user input that is submitted to the assistant is passed to the Discovery service as a search query. If the Watson Assistant integration provides a customer ID, then the resulting /message API request includes the customer ID in the header, and the ID is passed through to the Discovery /query API request. To delete any query data that is associated with a specific customer, you must send a separate delete request directly to the Discovery service instance that is linked your the assistant. See the appropriate documentation for the version of the API that is used by your Discovery service instance:

v1: Information security
v2: Information security

Querying user data

Use the v1 /logs method filter parameter to search an application log for specific user data. For example, to search for data specific to a customer_id that matches my_best_customer, the query might be:

curl -X GET -u "apikey:3Df... ...Y7Pc9" \
"{url}/v2/assistants/{assistant_id}/logs?version=2020-04-01&filter=customer_id::my_best_customer"

where {url} is the appropriate URL for your instance. For more details, see Service endpoint.

See the Filter query reference for additional details.

Deleting data

To delete any message log data associated with a specific user that your assistant might have stored, use the DELETE /user_data v1 API method. Specify the customer ID of the user by passing a customer_id parameter with the request.

Only data that was added by using the POST /message API endpoint with an associated customer ID can be deleted using this delete method. Data that was added by other methods cannot be deleted based on customer ID. For example, entities and intents that were added from customer conversations, cannot be deleted in this way. Personal Data is not supported for those methods.

IMPORTANT: Specifying a customer_id will delete all messages with that customer_id that were received before the delete request, across your entire Watson Assistant instance, not just within one skill.

As an example, to delete any message data associated with a user that has the customer ID abc from your Watson Assistant instance, send the following cURL command:

curl -X DELETE -u "apikey:3Df... ...Y7Pc9" \
"{url}/v2/user_data?customer_id=abc&version=2020-04-01"

where {url} is the appropriate URL for your instance. For more details, see Service endpoint.

An empty JSON object {} is returned.

For more information, see the API reference.

Note: Delete requests are processed in batches and may take up to 24 hours to complete.

Information security

European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

More information

Labeling and deleting data in Watson Assistant

Before you begin

Querying user data

Deleting data