Managing Group Privacy - v6.13+

In the Elements v6.12 release, Groups underwent a significant expansion of functionality to allow organisations to capture a much wider range of metadata about groups. In Elements v6.13 we introduced new privacy settings for Groups in order to be able to clearly differentiate between Groups which are suitable to be shared publicly and groups which should remain internal to Elements.

There are two privacy levels that are supported by Groups; 

• Public - This indicates that the data can be shared publicly in downstream systems. 

• Internal - Data marked as ‘Internal’ should not be shared publicly but can be viewed by other users of the system.

Standard users who do not possess any elevated roles do not currently have permission to view groups. However, the ‘Internal’ permission level is used to indicate that record and group  data may be viewed internally and you should therefore not add information that you consider to be of a private nature. Future changes to the system may modify the roles required to view information about Groups. 

To ensure data privacy, when upgrading to 6.13+, Groups have a default privacy level of ‘internal’. As you identify Groups which should be made publicly available you can adjust the privacy level of those Groups. 

Due to the hierarchical nature of Groups within Elements and so as to ensure that group information is never shown inappropriately, Group privacy levels are designed to automatically ‘cascade’ down the group tree. 

The subgroups of a group cannot be more public than that group. This override is automatically applied by the system, so that while it is possible to choose a public privacy level for a group, the ‘effective’ privacy level will remain internal until the parent group is updated. It is therefore important to consider the privacy level of Groups with respect to their position within the hierarchy.

It should be noted that the privacy level of a Group does not impact the user profile privacy levels of individuals who are members of the Group. Group privacy level is intended to control the display of group specific data - e.g. record metadata and Group related information.