Data Capture & Privacy

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Use Cases

• Control what user data is collected – Decide which interactions, inputs, and sessions are captured to balance insights with privacy requirements.
• Protect sensitive information – Mask or exclude specific elements, text inputs, URLs, or pages to prevent PII from being recorded.
• Enable secure session replays – Observe real user behavior while ensuring sensitive fields and actions are hidden or excluded.
• Optimize session replay usage – Make the most of your sessions allowance by recording only users or segments that are relevant to your analysis.
• Support compliance and governance – Configure capture rules that align with GDPR, CCPA, or internal data-handling policies.

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Key Controls & Options

Before getting started, navigate to the ‘Data Capture & Privacy’ tab within your settings.

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1. Core data capture settings

• Automatically capture frontend events - Enable Userpilot’s autocapture feature (raw events) to record frontend interactions automatically: clicks, text input changes, and form submissions. When enabled, Userpilot will start collecting this data once the SDK is active in your app.
• Session playback toggle - Enable or disable Session Replay entirely. If turned off, Userpilot won’t store or display replayable session data
• Capture text input - Enable text capture if you want typed interactions to show up in replays; if disabled, all text inputs are masked.
• Detection of Frustrations - Automatically flags signals that indicate a user struggled. It detects dead clicks, rage clicks, u-turns, form abandonment, and error clicks during a session.
• Network & Console Capturing - Records network errors, console errors, and uncaught exceptions and syncs them to the session replay in the built-in Dev Tools panel, so you can debug without pulling in engineering.

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2. Element capture restrictions

Use element-level rules to control how specific UI elements are captured in auto-captured events and session replays.

• Mask elements — Hide the text content of selected elements in session replays. Masked elements remain visible in replays, but their content is replaced so sensitive information isn’t exposed.
• Exclude elements — Fully exclude selected elements from data capture. Interactions, text, and metadata related to these elements won’t be recorded in raw events or session replays.
• Exclude attributes — You can also exclude specific attributes (for example, value, placeholder, or custom data attributes) to prevent sensitive or unnecessary information from being captured.

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3. Data capture restrictions

Data capture restrictions allow you to limit where auto-captured events and session data are collected.

• Restrict by domain - Exclude specific domains or subdomains from being recorded. This is useful for omitting sensitive areas such as authentication flows, billing pages, or internal tools.
• Restrict by user location - Control data capture based on a user’s physical location (for example, country or region). This helps you align data collection with regional privacy requirements or internal policies.
• Ignore Frustrations and errors - Set rules to exclude specific interactions from frustration and error detection. Pick a frustration or error type (e.g. rage click), scope it to where it occurred (e.g. Path equals /checkout/payment), and Userpilot will stop flagging that interaction in sessions.

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4. Session replay restrictions

Session replay restrictions let you control whose sessions are recorded and stored.

• Segment-based recording — Limit session replays to specific user or company segments (for example, paid users, users on a certain plan, or users in a specific region).

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See also

• Data Retention — control how long Userpilot stores your analytics events and session replays.

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FAQs