Overview

Session Replay provides privacy controls to ensure organizations of any scale do not expose sensitive or personal data. Data is stored on Datadog-managed cloud instances and encrypted at rest.

Default privacy options for Session Replay are designed to protect end user privacy and prevent sensitive organizational information from being collected.

By enabling Session Replay, you can automatically mask sensitive elements from being recorded through the RUM Browser SDK. When data is masked, that data is not collected in its original form by Datadog’s SDKs and thus is not sent to the backend.

Configuration

To enable your privacy settings, set defaultPrivacyLevel to mask, mask-user-input, or allow in your JavaScript configuration.

Note: If the privacy setting is not specified when enabling Session Replay, mask is enabled by default.

import { datadogRum } from '@datadog/browser-rum';

datadogRum.init({
    applicationId: '<DATADOG_APPLICATION_ID>',
    clientToken: '<DATADOG_CLIENT_TOKEN>',
    site: '<DATADOG_SITE>',
    //  service: 'my-web-application',
    //  env: 'production',
    //  version: '1.0.0',
    sessionSampleRate: 100,
    sessionReplaySampleRate: 100,
    trackResources: true,
    trackLongTasks: true,
    trackUserInteractions: true,
    defaultPrivacyLevel: 'mask' | 'mask-user-input' | 'allow'
});

After updating your configuration, you can override elements of your HTML documents with the below privacy options.

Mask mode

Setting defaultPrivacyLevel to mask mode masks all HTML text, user input, images, links and data-* attributes. Text on your application is replaced with X, rendering the page into a wireframe.

Note: Masked data is not stored on Datadog servers.

Mask user input mode

Masks most form fields such as inputs, text areas, and checkbox values while recording all other text as is. Inputs are replaced with three asterisks (***) and text areas are obfuscated with space-preserving x characters.

Allow mode

Records everything unmasked.

Privacy options

Override an HTML element

You can set an application-wide default and tag the privacy level of an individual HTML element using one of two methods:

1. An HTML attribute such as data-dd-privacy="allow" | "mask" | "hidden" | "mask-user-input" or
2. An HTML class name such as class="dd-privacy-allow" | "dd-privacy-mask-user-input" | "dd-privacy-mask" | "dd-privacy-hidden".

The example below demonstrates how you can override certain elements in your HTML to customize your obfuscation:

<div class="line-item" data-dd-privacy="allow">
    <div class="label">Order Value</div>
    <div class="value">
        $<span data-dd-privacy="mask">50.00</span>
    </div>
</div>

The dollar amount in the cart is replaced with asterisks.

Privacy restrictions

In order to protect end-user privacy, regardless of your privacy configuration, the following HTML elements are always masked:

• Input elements of type password, email, and tel
• Elements with autocomplete attributes such as credit card numbers, expiration dates, and security codes

Advanced privacy options

Completely hide an element

hidden is an advanced privacy setting that completely hides specific elements instead of obscuring the text.

If you are concerned about the number of visible elements in sensitive fields, enable hidden for your specific elements. These HTML elements are replaced with a gray block at the time of recording.

In this example replay session, the username in the Datadog navigation is obfuscated.

Override the action name

To obscure the default action name and update the naming convention for individual actions, set the override for your individual action names.

You can rename the default action name by overriding the name of a specific HTML element with a more general name. By default, Datadog displays the custom override name.

For example, override the following name with <div data-dd-action-name="Address" > → Action: "Click on Address".

Additional use cases to override the default action name include masking sensitive data in the RUM Explorer and streamlining your analytics and search with custom naming conventions.

Mask action names

By default, if you wish to mask all action names, you can use the enablePrivacyForActionName option in conjunction with the mask privacy setting. This operation automatically substitutes all non-overridden action names with the placeholder Masked Element. This setting is also designed to be compatible with existing HTML override attributes.

Further Reading

Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:

Session ReplayDOCUMENTATION Obfuscate user data with Session Replay default privacy settingsBLOG