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How to Suppress Text, Images, Videos and User Input from Collected Data

In this article, you'll learn how to suppress text, images, videos and user input from collected data on your site. This includes an overview of data suppression as well as steps on how to suppress specific elements, singular pages, and content across the entire site. 

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Data suppression and how it works at Hotjar

Hotjar has been designed with user privacy in mind. Data suppression is one aspect of this design. It involves identifying and removing personally identifiable information (PII) that could potentially identify an individual before sending a session from your website's Document Object Model (DOM) to Hotjar. After a session is sent, there is no way to retrieve or suppress data, and updating suppression settings will not apply the updated settings retroactively. By suppressing sensitive details, you can still glean valuable insights from user interactions on your website without compromising user privacy. At Hotjar, you can suppress page content as well as entire pages from Heatmaps, Recordings, and Survey screenshots.

By default, Hotjar suppresses user input. However, data collection can be enabled on some allowed input fields. Follow the steps in our How to Show Elements and Keystrokes in Data Collection article to remove suppression on allowed input fields.

Suppressed data appears differently depending on the field type input is entered into. Note that the number of asterisks is random and it doesn't match the number of characters suppressed. Example fields include:

  • Text type fields will show ***
  • Number type fields will show 111
  • Date type fields will show 01/01/1979
  • Placeholder attributes in input elements will show ***, even if the placeholder is empty.

Hotjar will always suppress numbers 9 digits or longer regardless of settings

This prevents Hotjar from capturing information such as credit card numbers or telephone numbers. This also includes characters such as hyphens or colons separating numbers.

Site-wide, page-specific, and specific-element suppression

Hotjar disables most content suppression by default. You control page content suppression for each Site in your Account. You can change suppressing settings in your Site Settings.

Visit Sites & Organizations within your Hotjar Account.

Click the gear icon to access Site Settings for the site you would like to suppress content on.

You will need Admin team access permissions or higher.

Under Data suppression toggle which options you want on or off.

Each suppression setting is shown as a checkbox.

You have various content suppression options available. They include:

  • Location information: The user’s country of origin is suppressed. Hotjar does not store end-user IP addresses at rest.

  • On-page content: All content including images and videos is suppressed. Boxes with a diagonal line-pattern (seen below) will show the same size as the original image/video. This can be done for all pages across your site, or only for specific pages.

    An example of suppressed content, showing a box with diagonal lines, the same size as the original image.

  • On-page text: All text-content is suppressed.

  • On-page numeric text: All numeric characters are suppressed. Hotjar enables this by default.

  • On-page email addresses:  Anything that matches an email address pattern is suppressed. Hotjar enables this by default.

  • Keystroke data on allowed input fields suppression - Suppress input data even if those inputs have been allowed previously.

Click Update to save changes.

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Specific element suppression

You can suppress individual elements by making a small modification to your page’s HTML. This includes image and video suppression. Your development team can add “data-hj-suppress” as an HTML attribute or class to the element(s). This suppresses all text and image/video content inside the element, including child elements.

You cannot suppress inline SVGs

SVGs linked as the source for image elements can be suppressed, but inline SVGs cannot.

Here’s an example of suppressing a paragraph / a single HTML element by adding it as an attribute:

<p data-hj-suppress> Suppress me</p>
  <p>Do not suppress me.</p>

You can also add the attribute as a class:

<p class="data-hj-suppress">Suppress me.</p>
  <p>Do not suppress me.</p>

You can suppress child elements by applying the attribute to parents:

<div data-hj-suppress>
    <img src="suppressed_image.png" />
    <p>Suppressed text</p>
  </div>

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