PII Leakage Prevention in Session Replay
The cursor blinks. A user types their email address. Your backend logs it. Your analytics tool records it. Your session replay silently captures the moment forever.
This is where PII leakage begins—and where it must end.
Session replay systems are powerful. They help debug flows, track abandoned carts, and see how real users experience your app. But when these tools record personally identifiable information (PII), they become liabilities. Every keystroke, every DOM element containing sensitive data becomes a possible data breach vector.
PII leakage prevention in session replay means building guardrails before anything is recorded. The core principle: no sensitive data should ever enter your replay payloads. Prevention beats masking after the fact. Once PII is captured, risk already exists.
To achieve this, enforce these controls at the capture layer:
- DOM element exclusion – Explicitly remove inputs, text fields, and components known to contain PII.
- Real-time redaction – Apply rules that detect and replace sensitive strings in memory before serialization.
- Attribute-based filtering – Tag form fields or containers with
data-no-replayattributes to prevent capture. - Custom event mapping – Record only essential actions, not raw text or values.
Combine client-side filters with server-side validation to ensure no recorder, proxy, or analytics endpoint ever stores dangerous data. For compliance, log proof that your session replay pipeline follows these restrictions.
Engineers should also test prevention using synthetic sessions—with deliberate fake PII—to confirm leaks cannot bypass safeguards. Automation here is essential; manual checks miss edge cases.
If you operate at scale, every session replay frame is a potential data point for threat actors. Strip PII before it exists in logs, exports, crash reports, monitoring dashboards, or developer tools. When done right, replay remains a lens into user behavior—but not a liability.
Implementing PII leakage prevention for session replay does not need months of work. See how hoop.dev eliminates sensitive capture at the source. Spin it up, configure exclusion rules, and watch it run—live—in minutes.