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o11y(email): remove recipient email from telemetry#3185

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puckpuck merged 2 commits intoopen-telemetry:mainfrom
niwoerner:niwoerner/remove-email-from-telemetry
Apr 10, 2026
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o11y(email): remove recipient email from telemetry#3185
puckpuck merged 2 commits intoopen-telemetry:mainfrom
niwoerner:niwoerner/remove-email-from-telemetry

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@niwoerner
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The semantic convention recommend to avoid capturing PII data unless absolutely necessary. (source

This PR stops capturing recipient email addresses in telemetry and uses order.id for correlation instead, which should be sufficient for troubleshooting.

@niwoerner niwoerner requested a review from a team as a code owner April 1, 2026 10:44
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puckpuck commented Apr 8, 2026

Part of me wants to keep the email attribute on the span data, and add a redaction processor to the collector instead. I think adding a comment in code for the email service that this is deliberate would be a good thing too.

Removing the entry in the log makes sense though since that's kinda unstructured and uglier to clean up in a collector.

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@puckpuck, I would say that we should show good pattern only here. If you would like to show some sensitive data redaction by the collector, we could introduce separate, fake "sensitive.data.demo.fake.attribute" and use it for such purposes.

I think that someone can inspire/copy paste the email example to the application.

@cyrille-leclerc
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I like @Kielek’s proposal: it highlights a common real-world but undesirable use case, shows how to mitigate it, and clearly sets the expectation that it is an antipattern.

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Yeah, let's do that. I'll create an issue for us to add a clearly fake but should be redacted attribute, and a processor to redact it.

@puckpuck puckpuck added this pull request to the merge queue Apr 10, 2026
@github-merge-queue github-merge-queue bot removed this pull request from the merge queue due to failed status checks Apr 10, 2026
@puckpuck puckpuck added this pull request to the merge queue Apr 10, 2026
@github-merge-queue github-merge-queue bot removed this pull request from the merge queue due to failed status checks Apr 10, 2026
@puckpuck puckpuck added this pull request to the merge queue Apr 10, 2026
Merged via the queue into open-telemetry:main with commit a8a3ea2 Apr 10, 2026
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4 participants