Browse Data Capture
Privacy and governance
Only what you turn on
Each capture feature is off until you turn it on, apart from page views and page signals. The collector refuses what a property has not turned on, and rebuilds clicks, scrolling, friction, data layer and checkout events from a fixed list of fields, so nothing else is stored.
Leave parts of your pages out
data-ac-ignoreon an element leaves out every click, swipe and friction signal inside it.data-ac-maskkeeps only that something there was clicked, not what.
Use them around anything sensitive, such as account pages or health questions.
What clicks and forms send
- A click on a field says only what kind of field it is, and a click on a choice says which question it asks, never the answer.
- A form's submit sends what its fields held, as the visitor entered them, and a search sends its term. It never sends a password, a card's security code, a one-time code, a PIN or an anti-forgery token.
- Anything that looks like an email address or a card number is removed from an element's text and attributes.
- Email and phone links keep only
mailto:ortel:.
Wrap forms whose answers you do not want stored in data-ac-ignore.
Page URLs
Before an event is stored, the collector removes every query parameter from its page URL that is not on the property's kept list, and drops the fragment after # unless you keep it.
Email addresses, JSON Web Tokens, long hexadecimal ids and card-like numbers in the path or a kept value are replaced with :redacted.
Keep a parameter on the URL data card only if its values are safe to store.
Data layers
The data layer fields you capture are stored as your site sends them. Use your capture rules to discard fields you do not want, and do not capture data layers that hold personal or sensitive data you have no need for.
Shopify checkout
The Shopify pixel sends the buyer's email, phone, name and addresses with each order.
Cookies
| Cookie | What it holds | How long it lasts |
|---|---|---|
pt_did | An anonymous device id | 2 years, or less where the browser caps it |
pt_sid | The current visit's id | 30 minutes after the last activity |
Both are first-party and SameSite=Lax, and Secure on HTTPS.
The tag uses no local storage or session storage, and never fingerprints a browser.
If cookies cannot be written, ids are kept in memory for that page only.
Set data-disable-storage on the script tag to run without cookies at all.
IP addresses and location
The visitor's IP address is never stored. Kontala keeps a shortened address, a hash of the address that changes daily, and the country, region, city and network it comes from. City-level location comes from DB-IP: if you share maps built from it, credit "IP Geolocation by DB-IP".
Bots
Bots and crawlers are flagged, never dropped, and left out of Analytics. Crawlers that announce themselves are checked against the address ranges Google, Bing, Apple, OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, DuckDuckGo and Common Crawl publish.
Retention
Collected events are kept for 400 days.
See also Consent and Data protection.