Overview
Mouseflow gives you full control over which elements or fields are recorded on your site, helping balance user privacy with meaningful insights. You can define how content is handled using Excluded, Masked, Whitelisted, and Tracked fields, ensuring that sensitive data is protected while still capturing relevant user interactions.
Excluded Content
Excluding fields prevents specific elements on your web pages from being recorded by Mouseflow. Excluded elements are visually identified with a transparent red box overlay in the Visual Privacy Tool, Heatmaps, and Session Replays.
Excluded content is removed before data is transmitted to Mouseflow, ensuring it remains private and irretrievable. Changes to excluded content apply only to new data — they do not retroactively remove content from previously recorded sessions.
Keystrokes in input fields containing personal data are masked by default for most Mouseflow accounts. Typically, manually excluding these fields is unnecessary. Learn more about keystroke exclusion here.
💡Note: Excluding large sections of a webpage can affect page layout, leading to potential misalignment in heatmaps. To minimize this, exclude only specific elements within a container, rather than the entire container itself.
Masked Content
Masking allows content on specified elements or fields to be obscured, while still tracking interactions like clicks and hovers. Masked elements appear with a transparent yellow block overlay in the Visual Privacy Tool, Session Replays, and Heatmaps. For form fields, masking allows you to obscure sensitive user inputs while still tracking their interactions, such as clicks, hovers, and field focus events. This ensures that privacy is maintained without losing valuable behavioral insights.
Like excluded fields, the masking process is handled locally, meaning the actual content of masked elements is never stored or accessible. Masking also applies to new data and cannot be applied retroactively to existing recordings.
Whitelisted Fields
By default, certain input fields may appear blank or have their values replaced with asterisks in Session Replays and Heatmaps—this is common for accounts based in the EU.
If you have verified that a field does not contain Personally Identifiable Information (PII), whitelisting allows you to record inputs in those specified fields.
Whitelisted fields are recorded only from the point-of-change forward and cannot be applied to previously collected data. If an element is both excluded and whitelisted, exclusion takes priority.
Tracked Content
In Click and Interactive Heatmaps, clickable elements such as links and buttons are automatically highlighted with a box displaying analytics, including the number of clicks and hovers.
However, there are situations where the link analytics are not applied automatically or users may frequently interact with non-clickable elements (e.g., mistaking them for links or simply selecting text).
Adding elements to your Tracked Fields list ensures their interaction data is recorded and ensures that link analytics appear for the specified element in heatmaps.
How to Use the Visual Privacy Tool
To access the Visual Privacy Tool, navigate to your Website Settings, locate the Exclude & Whitelist section and click the button 'Open Visual Privacy Tool'.
Then, you will be asked for the URL of the page you would like to configure:
💡Note: The Visual Privacy Tool can only be launched on pages where you have installed the Mouseflow tracking code. Additionally, if there is cookie content on the page, you need to first accept cookies and refresh for the Visual Privacy Tool to open.
The Visual Privacy Tool displays as a menu at the bottom of your browser window on the selected page. Here’s how you can interact with it:
Selecting Elements: First, select the appropriate action in the left side of the menu. Then, use your cursor to highlight elements you want to exclude, whitelist, mask or track.
Navigating Pages: To navigate to a different page, click the "Hide to navigate" button.
Removing Selections: To remove a selection, hover over the element and click.
Saving Selections: To save your changes, click both the 'Save and close' button in the tool and the 'Save' button under the Exclude & Whitelist section on the settings page.
Cancelling Changes: Click the 'Close Privacy Tool' button to exit without saving changes.
To help visualize how different content settings are represented within the Visual Privacy Tool, refer to the chart below.
Video tutorial
If you'd like a quick visual guide(< 3 min.), watch our tutorial on the Mouseflow Privacy Settings and the Visual Privacy Tool below:
Manual Configuration with CSS Selectors
It is also possible to exclude or whitelist content directly within your site’s settings, without launching the Visual Privacy Tool.
To exclude, mask, whitelist, or track an element from your Website Settings simply enter the CSS selector for the element and click Save. The selector can be the element's ID, class, or even CSS path as shown in the image below.
💡 Tip: If you'd like a visual guide on how to copy and paste a CSS selector into Website Settings, check out this interactive demo for a quick walkthrough:
Things to Remember
If an element is added to both Excluded Content and Whitelisted fields, it will be excluded - exclusion takes precedence.
The effectiveness of the Visual Privacy Tool depends on the stability of Selector Paths. Changes in your website element's class names and IDs can impact the configured settings and click counts on those elements.
Newly excluded or whitelisted fields only impact data collected after these settings are saved. They cannot be retroactively applied to existing heatmaps or session replays.
For optimal performance, open the Visual Privacy Tool on a desktop device. It may not load properly in a small browser window.
By leveraging Website Settings and the Visual Privacy Tool, you have full control over what content is recorded, masked, or excluded from your Session Replays and Heatmaps. Whether you're ensuring user privacy, maintaining compliance, or refining data collection, these tools allow you to customize tracking with precision.
Keep in mind that changes apply only to new data and cannot be retroactively applied to past session replays or heatmaps.
Need more help? Please reach out to our Support Team