Privacy and Reference
Data Privacy, Anonymisation and Log Retention in Logify
An activity log is personal data, and holding it indefinitely creates a privacy liability. Logify gives you four free controls to manage that: Data Anonymization to hide IP addresses and countries, Exclusion Rules to avoid recording activity at all, a Log Retention Period that auto-purges old entries, and Cleanup on Uninstall to remove everything when you delete the plugin. Everything is stored in your own database, and nothing leaves your site unless you turn on an optional feature.
What data does Logify collect?
Logify stores its activity log in your own database — nothing is sent anywhere unless you switch on an optional feature. This page covers the controls you have over what gets recorded, what is shown, and how to keep the log from growing without limit.
There are three controls worth knowing:
- Data Anonymization — hides IP addresses in the Activity Logs screen.
- Exclusion Rules — stop activity being recorded at all.
- Cleanup on Uninstall — remove every trace of the plugin when you delete it.
Why is it helpful?
An activity log is personal data. It records who did what, from which IP address, using which browser. If you operate under GDPR or a similar regime, you need to be able to say what you collect, show it when asked, and delete it when required.
These controls let you:
- Collect less in the first place. The cleanest way to satisfy a privacy requirement is not to record the data at all.
- Keep IP addresses off screen for staff who review logs but have no business seeing them.
- Remove a person's history on request, from the admin screen or the command line.
- Leave nothing behind when the plugin is removed.
How to use it
Step 1: Choose your anonymisation level
Go to Logify > Settings > General. The Data Anonymization option offers three choices:
| Setting | Effect |
|---|---|
| Do Not Anonymise (default) | IP addresses and countries are shown in full. |
| Anonymise Only IP | IP addresses are masked — 192.168.1.42 becomes 192.168.1.xxx. IPv6 addresses lose their last four groups. The country is still shown. |
| Anonymise All Data | IP addresses are masked and the country is hidden as well. |
Masking applies everywhere the value is surfaced: the Activity Logs list, the details panel of an individual entry, the User Sessions screen, and every export format.
Important: this controls what is displayed and exported. The full IP is still stored in the database, so anonymisation is a disclosure control rather than a collection control. If you must not hold IP addresses at all, use Exclusion Rules to avoid recording the activity in the first place, or delete the entries afterwards.
Step 2: Stop recording what you do not need
Logify > Settings > Exclusions drops activity before it is ever written to the database. You can exclude by:
- user
- role
- IP address
- post type
- post status
- whole event categories
This is the strongest privacy control in the plugin, because excluded activity never becomes a record in the first place. See How Can I Stop Certain Activities From Being Recorded?
Step 3: Set how long entries are kept
Logify > Settings > General > Log Retention Period controls how long an entry stays in the database:
| Setting | Effect |
|---|---|
| 7 Days | Entries older than 7 days are removed automatically. |
| 30 Days (default) | Entries older than 30 days are removed automatically. |
| Keep Indefinitely | Nothing is ever removed automatically. |
A daily task does the clearing, working in batches so a large backlog does not tie up the database in one go. Developers can override the period with the kc_lf_log_retention_days filter — returning 0 keeps everything.
Before you lower this on an established site, export first. Purged entries cannot be recovered.
You can also clear entries yourself at any time:
- Bulk delete — select rows on the Activity Logs screen and delete them. See How Can I Delete Multiple Activity Logs At Once?
- Single delete — the Delete row action on an individual entry.
- WP-CLI — clear by user or event type from the command line. See How Can I Manage Logify From Command Line?
Exporting before you delete gives you an archive to keep outside the database. See How Can I Download My Website Activity Report?
Step 4: Decide what happens when the plugin is removed
Logify > Settings > General > Cleanup on Uninstall controls whether deleting the plugin also deletes its data. Turn it on and removing Logify drops the activity log table, its settings, scheduled tasks, and related metadata, leaving the database as it was before installation.
Leave it off if you plan to reinstall later and want your history preserved.
Answering a data request
If someone asks what you hold about them, or asks you to delete it:
- Open Logify > Activity Logs and filter by that User.
- Export the filtered view if you need to provide a copy — CSV or JSON are the easiest to hand over.
- Delete their entries with the bulk action, or from the command line:
wp logify clear --user-id=123
What leaves your site
Everything Logify records is stored in your own database. The one optional exception is country lookup: when Logify cannot determine a country locally, it can ask an external service. That behaviour, and how to avoid it entirely, is covered in How Logify Determines IP Address and Country.
Conclusion
Logify gives you four privacy controls that map directly to GDPR-style obligations: Data Anonymization to hide IPs and countries from the log screens, Exclusion Rules to avoid recording data at all, Log Retention Period to purge old entries automatically, and Cleanup on Uninstall to leave nothing behind. Collect less where you can, keep only as long as you need, and export before you delete. To control the one thing that can leave your site, see How Logify Determines IP Address and Country.
FAQs
Does Logify record passwords?
No. Password changes are recorded as an event so you can see that a password was changed and by whom, but the password value itself is never stored or logged. The same applies to other secrets — Logify records that a change happened, not the sensitive value behind it.
Does anonymisation apply retroactively?
Yes, for display. Because Data Anonymization controls what the Activity Logs screen and exports show rather than what is stored, switching it on immediately masks existing rows as well as new ones. It does not rewrite the database — the full IP address remains stored — so to remove stored data you must delete the entries or exclude them from being recorded.
Can Logify record arbitrary retention periods, like 90 days?
Not from the settings screen. The Log Retention Period dropdown offers only 7 Days, 30 Days, or Keep Indefinitely. Any other period must be set programmatically with the kc_lf_log_retention_days filter, which returns the number of days to keep (returning 0 keeps everything and disables the daily purge).
Who can see the activity log?
Logify's log screens are restricted to administrators, so ordinary users and subscribers cannot view who did what. If reviewers need to work with logs but should not see visitor IP addresses, set Data Anonymization to Anonymise Only IP or Anonymise All Data to keep those values off screen while still allowing the review.
Where is my activity log data stored?
All Logify data lives in your own WordPress database, in the plugin's activity log table — nothing is sent to KaizenCoders or a third party. The only optional outbound request is a country lookup when a location cannot be resolved locally, which you can disable entirely. See How Logify Determines IP Address and Country.