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Hiding Sensitive Data from Survey123 in AGOL

emoreno

Hi ESRI Community!

I was wondering if anyone had any experience hiding sensitive data from a Survey123 in AGOL? We have a form that we'd like to build using Survey123 as we can auto populate some of the required fields using our GIS, but it would also collect some individual-sensitive information that we wouldn't want anyone in the organization to see unless they are an admin or a few specific individuals in our Billing department. Does anyone have any experience doing this before? Should we do this in AGOL or is there something else we should use? Any advice is appreciated.

Thank you!

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Accepted answers

MobiusSnake

You can use hosted feature layer views to do this. You'll want to do something like this:

Create a hosted feature layer in ArcGIS Online by creating a new layer manually, posting a File GDB with your schema and creating a layer from it, or publishing directly from ArcGIS Pro.
Create a hosted feature layer view from that. Allow editing to be write-only and disable all reading on the service. This creates a "black hole" where users can add records but can't view them or update them.
Create your Survey123 form so that it writes to that view.
Create a "restricted" hosted feature layer view that is read-only. For each of the sensitive fields, go to the field properties and hide them from the view.
Create an "unrestricted" hosted feature layer view that is read-only. Don't hide any fields here.

Now you'll want to set up sharing like this:

On the actual "base" layer, don't share this with anyone. Only the owner and other ArcGIS Online admins in your organization will have access to it; they'll have full access, read/add/update/delete/etc., this can't be changed.
Share the "black hole" view with anyone who needs to submit forms, this could be a group or the public. They'll be able to submit forms but that's it.
Share the "restricted" view with your users who require basic read access.
Share the "unrestricted" view with your billing department.

All comments

MobiusSnake

You can use hosted feature layer views to do this. You'll want to do something like this:

Create a hosted feature layer in ArcGIS Online by creating a new layer manually, posting a File GDB with your schema and creating a layer from it, or publishing directly from ArcGIS Pro.
Create a hosted feature layer view from that. Allow editing to be write-only and disable all reading on the service. This creates a "black hole" where users can add records but can't view them or update them.
Create your Survey123 form so that it writes to that view.
Create a "restricted" hosted feature layer view that is read-only. For each of the sensitive fields, go to the field properties and hide them from the view.
Create an "unrestricted" hosted feature layer view that is read-only. Don't hide any fields here.

Now you'll want to set up sharing like this:

On the actual "base" layer, don't share this with anyone. Only the owner and other ArcGIS Online admins in your organization will have access to it; they'll have full access, read/add/update/delete/etc., this can't be changed.
Share the "black hole" view with anyone who needs to submit forms, this could be a group or the public. They'll be able to submit forms but that's it.
Share the "restricted" view with your users who require basic read access.
Share the "unrestricted" view with your billing department.

ryanuthoff

There are probably a handful of ways you could implement a solution for this, but I'll share what I think might be the easiest solution.

Create your Survey123 form and publish it like normal. Then, lock down the hosted feature service. Of course, you will still need to share the hosted feature service to those who need to submit surveys, but you can lock it down from the settings page to where users can only see the features they create (or none at all). See screenshot below.

After you do that, you can create a View Layer from your hosted feature service and specify the fields you want visible to your admins or anyone else that needs access. Upon creating the view, the default behavior is that editing is disabled and that all data is visible (meaning that people can see all the features, even if they didn't create them). But, you can enable editing if necessary.

ryanuthoff

Here is the Esri support article for this method describing the workflow: https://support.esri.com/en-us/knowledge-base/how-to-create-the-fieldworker-view-for-surveys-publishe-000020413

Richard_Purkis

Hi @emoreno

I echo @MobiusSnake's suggestion to use hosted feature layer views to find a solution. This is the practice as recommended in the blog article when creating public surveys which achieves the same outcome of "not wanting to share public data". The blog article can be found here:

Getting Started with Public Surveys

High level steps:

Create a hosted feature layer
Create a view to use as submission url in Survey123 shared to required survey submitters
Create views for viewing results with sensitive fields hidden if required

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