Loghound is self-hosted. There is no Loghound company, no telemetry and no vendor with a copy of your traffic, which makes almost every privacy question your decision. This page says what leaves the machine and what is never collected; how addresses are stored, GDPR and a text for your visitors each have a page of their own.
Figure 1 — everything that leaves the machine, in one picture. The two destinations on the right cannot be switched off; the four on the top can, each on its own.
Visitor addresses, plus your account email and API key so the platform knows whose lookup it is
Visitor addresses
Visitor addresses
Visitor addresses, for reverse lookups
Everything Loghound stores — every hit and session document
Your account email and API key, and the index names being created or checked. No visitor data. Only during setup, and afterwards for the credential check and the plan figures
Loghound provisions and manages them and cannot do that on a Solr it does not administer, so an account is a hard requirement and your log-derived data leaves your machine for Opensolr’s infrastructure. That is a processor relationship and you should treat it as one in your records.
With all four enrichers off, no visitor address leaves the machine for anywhere but your own indexes. Loghound still works: it loses geography, network data and reverse DNS, which costs you the Networks view and the Map, and silences four of the 26 rules: timezone mismatch, datacentre + browser UA, desktop on a mobile carrier and the reverse DNS claim check. Everything on the behavioural and execution planes is unaffected. The strongest posture available is all four off plus hashed addresses: How addresses are stored.
- No session replay. No page recording, no mouse-path recording, no screen capture, and no plan to add one.
- No keystrokes, no form values, no clipboard. The beacon counts key-press events; it never looks at which key.
- No page content. Loghound never reads the body of your pages.
- No cross-site tracking. No shared identifier, no third-party domain, no cookie sync, nothing to join against.
- No cookies set by the beacon, at all, by default. The visitor identifier is a derived hash, documented as such rather than presented as anonymous. The panel sets one session cookie for your administrators.
- No query strings, except parameters you name yourself.
- No mouse coordinates on the wire. Up to sixteen are sampled into memory purely to answer one question — do three consecutive points fall on an exactly straight line — and only the verdict leaves the browser.
- No telemetry to the project. There is nothing to send it to.
If your application puts anything identifying in a URL — an address in a query string, a password reset token, an order number, a document name — it is already in your access log, and Loghound will index it and make it searchable. That is not a change Loghound introduces, but it does make it much easier to find. Check what your URLs contain before you index a year of them.
The same applies, more sharply, to the option that stores the complete original log line. It roughly doubles the index and keeps a full copy of every request line including anything sensitive in it — turn it off unless you actually need to re-score history under a future ruleset.
Privacy & retention
- What leaves the machine
- How addresses are stored
- GDPR
- Text for your visitors
- Retention & disk