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.
Data suppression and how it works
Data suppression involves identifying and removing personal data that could potentially identify an individual before sending a session from your website's Document Object Model (DOM) to Contentsquare. 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.
You can suppress page content as well as entire pages from Heatmaps, Session Replay, and Survey screenshots.
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 inputs are replaced with bullets, `•••`
- Number type inputs are replaced with zeros `000`
- Emails are replaced with `CS_ANONYMIZED_EMAIL`.
- Credit Card number patterns are replaced with `CS_ANONYMIZED_PII`
- All other text type fields and attributes are replaced with `AAA`
Note: Emails and credit card number patterns will always be replaced regardless of settings.
Site-wide, page-specific, and specific-element suppression
Most content suppression is disabled by default (except for those mentioned above). You control page content suppression for each Site in your Account. You can change suppressing settings in your 'Site Settings'.
1. Navigate to ‘Sites & Organizations’.
2. Click the gear icon to access ‘Site Settings’ for the site you would like to suppress content on.
3. 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. We do not store end-user IP addresses at rest.
- On-page content: All content including images and videos is suppressed. Suppressed content will be replaced with an image that reads "Hidden zone". This can be done for all pages across your site, or only for specific pages.
- On-page text: All text content is suppressed.
- On-page numeric text: All numeric characters in text elements and sensitive attributes are anonymized. The sensitive attributes include `name`, `value`, `title`, `alt`, `label`, and `placeholder`. Note that `href` and `src` attributes are not anonymized.
4. Click ‘Update’ to save changes.
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-cs-mask” 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 masked (like all images), 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>