Real-Time PII Masking in Session Replay

The cursor blinks. A user types their email. You record the session. The raw truth appears: sensitive data sits in your logs, unmasked, waiting for trouble.

Real-time PII masking in session replay stops that risk before it exists. It replaces personal identifiers—names, emails, phone numbers, addresses—on the fly as the session streams in. There is no batch process. No delay. The data is clean before it ever touches storage.

Engineers often try to solve this by sanitizing after capture. That approach fails under load and still exposes raw PII in transit. Real-time masking changes the rules. The capture pipeline includes detection and redaction inline. Regex and AI-based detectors can identify PII values at millisecond scale. Text nodes are rewritten instantly. Structured fields are scrubbed before commit.

Session replay tools without live masking create liability. Replay video pixels can leak typed input or autofilled data. With dynamic masking, even keystrokes rendering into the DOM are intercepted and replaced in real time. The replay engine still shows user actions, but the sensitive data is never revealed—not to logs, not to operators, not to attackers.

The top benefits of real-time PII masking in session replay:

• Zero PII storage in raw capture archives.
• Full fidelity of behavioral analytics without privacy violations.
• Compliance with GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA from the moment of ingest.
• Reduced risk surface for breach impact.
• No need to trust post-processing jobs.

Implementing this requires a capture script that intercepts DOM changes. It streams sanitized deltas to your server via WebSocket or HTTP. Masking rules run in-memory, meaning detection keeps pace with user input. This architecture ensures every replay frame is privacy-safe the instant it is born.

The result is a strong privacy guarantee baked into the core of your session replay stack. No copies of PII exist anywhere in the pipeline. No temporary exposure during processing. Every replay is safe to share internally or externally without risk.

You do not need bulky integrations or complex deployment to achieve it. See it live now with hoop.dev—spin up real-time PII masking in session replay and watch a session stream with sensitive data gone in minutes.