Privacy and Data Handling

Privacy and data handling

Privacy is not an optional extra in this plugin. It is one of the main reasons I am building it this way in the first place.

Core principles

I want the plugin to be:

• first-party
• proportionate
• understandable
• configurable
• useful without relying on fingerprinting or third-party pixels

Privacy defaults

The current defaults already support:

• hashed IP handling for reporting and matching
• raw IP expiry
• raw phone retention windows
• session retention controls
• Do Not Track handling
• logged-in admin exclusion
• optional internal-IP exclusion
• basic bot filtering

What I do not want this plugin to do

I am deliberately avoiding:

• browser fingerprinting
• third-party marketing pixels
• hidden cross-site profiling
• casual over-collection of form data

Form tracking

The native form tracking support is meant for signal collection, not content capture.

That means I can record that a form submission happened without storing the full field values in the plugin tables.

Chat lead capture

The assistant can now store lightweight commercial follow-up details from chat, but I still want that to stay proportionate.

In practice that means:

• names, email addresses, phone numbers, company names, and roles are only stored when the visitor shares them directly or the chat flow can infer them from what they voluntarily typed
• the assistant is meant to ask for missing follow-up details gently, not pester repeatedly
• lightweight local IP-based memory is used to make repeat conversations less repetitive, not to build hidden cross-site profiles

Calls and phone data

Phone-related data is handled with retention and hashing in mind, just as IP data is. The schema keeps room for raw values where operationally necessary, but it also includes explicit expiry fields so that sensitive raw data is not treated as permanent by default.

Manual privacy purge

The admin includes a manual privacy purge action. That is there because data minimisation should be practical, not theoretical.

Practical position

If I need a plugin that depends on aggressive user profiling or third-party ad-tech behaviour, this is the wrong tool.

Adaptive Customer Engagement is meant to be useful for attribution and follow-up while staying within a cleaner first-party operating model.