---
title: "Captured payload anonymization"
description: "Personal data in captured example payloads is replaced with placeholders before a build leaves your site."
url: "https://wpwebhooks.org/docs/payload-anonymization/"
---

[WP Webhooks](https://wpwebhooks.org/) / [Docs](https://wpwebhooks.org/docs/) / Captured payload anonymization

Feature since v2.5.0

# Captured payload anonymization

Personal data in captured example payloads is replaced with placeholders before a build leaves your site.

A captured example payload is the one part of a build nobody wrote — the plugin recorded whatever a real visitor actually submitted. A WooCommerce order carries the billing and shipping address, the customer's email, phone number, IP address and user agent. Every export and every published build now replaces those with placeholders by default.

## Shape is preserved on purpose

The example payload exists so an importer can preview field mappings, and a preview needs the same keys, the same nesting and the same types. So every replacement is a plausible value of the same kind — `jane.doe@example.com`, `1 Example Street`, `203.0.113.10` — never a deleted key. Product names, totals, statuses, SKUs and IDs are left exactly as captured.

## What it looks for

Names, emails, phone numbers, street addresses, cities, postcodes, companies, IP addresses, user agents, dates of birth, and identifiers that unlock something (order keys, session ids, tokens). Field-name matching handles prefixes, so `_billing_email` and `customer_email` are treated the same, and `{key, value}` pairs — WooCommerce `meta_data`, ACF, most form plugins — are judged by the field name they declare rather than by the literal key `value`. Free text is scanned for emails, IP addresses and international phone numbers, which is what catches values the AI conversation quotes back at you.

## What is deliberately untouched

Field mappings, conditions, headers and URL params are configuration you wrote and reviewed, so they are left intact — blanking them would destroy what the build means.

## The one opt-out

A download offers "Keep the real captured values" for a private backup of your own site. Publishing ignores it entirely.

/ Related

[Import & Export](https://wpwebhooks.org/docs/import-export/)[Share a build](https://wpwebhooks.org/docs/share-a-build/)[Publish a build](https://wpwebhooks.org/docs/publish-a-build/)[Payload Mapping](https://wpwebhooks.org/docs/payload-mapping/)

/Ready

## Your next automation is  
one sentence away.

[Install Plugin→](https://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/flowsystems-webhook-actions.zip) [See the Plugin →](https://wpwebhooks.org/wordpress-webhook-plugin/)

$ wp plugin install flowsystems-webhook-actions --activate

## Structured data

```json
{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","name":"Captured payload anonymization — Feature — Webhook Actions Docs","description":"Personal data in captured example payloads is replaced with placeholders before a build leaves your site.","url":"https://wpwebhooks.org/docs/payload-anonymization/","isPartOf":{"@type":"WebSite","name":"WP Webhooks","url":"https://wpwebhooks.org"},"about":{"@type":"SoftwareApplication","name":"Webhook Actions","applicationCategory":"WordPress Plugin"}}
```