Personally-Identifying Information (PII) can appear in your page content or in user input. Hotjar has been designed with user privacy in mind. You can suppress page content from Heatmaps, Recordings, and Incoming Feedback screenshots. By default, Hotjar suppresses user input.
Suppressed data appears as asterisks, for example, *, or ***, of slightly randomized length instead of text. Input fields that accept numbers convert into 1s, for example, 111. Suppressing images is also possible.
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.
All suppression occurs before sending the data back to our servers. After collection, there is no way to retrieve or suppress data.
Learn more about:
Only Admins and Account Owners have access to edit suppression settings
You can find what your access permissions allow in our Team Member Permissions Guide.
Site-wide page content 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 on-page text.
You will need Admin team access permissions or higher.
Under Data suppression toggle which options you want on or off.
You have various content suppression options available. They include:
- Location information: The user’s country of origin is suppressed. This will also prevent Hotjar from storing any IP address information of any sort. Even without suppression settings, Hotjar removes the final octet of the user's IP address to protect their privacy.
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On-page content: All content including images is suppressed. Boxes with a diagonal line-pattern (seen below) will show the same size as the original image.
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On-page text: All text-content is suppressed.
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On-page numeric text: All numeric characters are suppressed. Hotjar enables this by default.
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On-page email addresses: Anything that matches an email address pattern is suppressed. Hotjar enables this by default.
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Keystroke data on allowed input fields suppression - Suppress input data even if those inputs have been allowed previously.
Specific element suppression
You can suppress individual elements by making a small modification to your page’s HTML. Your development team can add “data-hj-suppress” as an HTML attribute or class to the element(s). This suppresses all text and image content inside the element, including child elements.
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>
You cannot suppress inline SVGs
SVGs linked as the source for image elements can be suppressed, but inline SVGs cannot.
Removing suppression on input elements
By default, Hotjar suppresses all user input. You can allow data collection on some input elements. This is a 2-step process for Heatmaps. Recordings require an additional step.
Add “data-hj-allow” as an attribute or class to each input element:
<input name="code" type="text" data-hj-allow />
<input class="data-hj-allow" name="quantity" type="text" />The attribute/class can also be applied to textarea elements:
<textarea name="comment" data-hj-allow></textarea>
<textarea class="data-hj-allow" name="comment"></textarea>You can only allow text input elements
Text content cannot be allowed. If you need a mix of unsuppressed and suppressed page content, you can follow the advice on suppressing specific elements.
In Recordings Configuration select the Recording Keystroke Data option.
For a step-by-step walkthrough, Site-wide content suppression has more detail.
You cannot remove suppression from all input elements
Hotjar prevents you from removing suppression on any fields that may contain potentially sensitive personal information, even if you allow them. Hotjar always suppresses user input data for these fields:
- Long numbers, such as credit card and phone numbers: Hotjar assumes numbers longer than 9 digits are most likely phone numbers or credit cards. Users may make typos meaning that regular validation is not appropriate for suppression.
- Email addresses: If user input appears to be an email address, Hotjar will suppress this.
- Certain HTML fields: password or email input elements.
- Input fields with specific names or IDs equal to one of the following: username, name, firstname, surname, lastname, familyname, fullname, email, phone,cell, cellphone, telephone, tel, postcode, postalcode, zip, zipcode, mobile, address, ssn, security, securitynum, socialsec, socialsecuritynumber, socsec, ppsn, nationalinsurancenumber, nin, dob, dateofbirth, password, pass, adgangskode, authpw, contrasena, contrasenya, contrasinal, cyfrinair, contraseña, fjalëkalim, focalfaire, IP, creditcard, cc, ccnum, ccname, ccnumber, ccexpiry, ccexp, ccexpmonth, ccexpyear, cccvc, cccvv, cctype, cvc, cvv. For names and IDs, case and the symbols "-" and "_" are ignored.