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.