r/dataprotection

been thinking about this a lot lately. session replay tools like FullStory are genuinely useful for debugging UX issues but the compliance picture in California is a mess right now. CCPA/CPRA requires opt-outs for sharing behavioral data, and then you've got CIPA wiretapping claims on top of, that where plaintiffs are arguing that third-party vendors receiving replay data in real time counts as interception. courts are split on whether CIPA even applies here - late last year the LA Superior Court in Balabbo v. Wildflower Brands said the trap/trace provisions don't cover session replay, but other courts have let similar claims proceed. so you can't just point to one ruling and call it sorted. the practical tension is that proper compliance basically means gating the tool behind explicit consent, stripping out keystroke, capture, and making sure your vendor agreements actually limit what the third party can do with the data. all of which degrades the UX insights you were trying to get in the first place. anonymization helps but there's real debate about whether that's enough for the 'sharing' opt-out requirement or whether you need something more explicit. masking is also notoriously unreliable in practice - i've seen implementations where emails and form field content were still leaking through despite masking configs being in place. some teams I've talked to have just moved to self-hosted options like OpenReplay to cut out, the third-party doctrine problem entirely, others have gone consent-first with a noticeable drop in replay coverage. curious whether anyone here has actually found a setup that gives you decent UX data without, the compliance exposure, or if the honest answer is that you just have to accept the tradeoff.