When someone fills in a form, they see the questions. They don’t see what else is kept with their answers, or who else their browser talks to while the page is open. Often, nobody running the form does either.

What usually comes with an answer

Look at a response in many form tools, or at its export, and you may find more than the answers:

  • The IP address the answer came from.
  • Browser and device details, from what the browser says about itself.
  • An approximate location, worked out from the IP address.
  • The page the person came from, and when they opened and sent the form.

Then there’s what the page sends elsewhere. Every script, font, CAPTCHA or pixel loaded from another company’s server gets a request from the visitor’s browser, and every request carries their IP address.

Why it matters

An IP address is personal data. The EU’s Court of Justice decided this in Breyer (C-582/14) in 2016, even for addresses that change, because someone else (the internet provider) can tie them to a person.

That has practical consequences:

  1. You have to explain it. Everything you collect belongs in your privacy notice, and “we also keep your IP address and device” is a hard sentence to justify on a contact form.
  2. You have to protect it and delete it. More data kept means more to secure, to hand over when someone asks for their data, and to delete on time.
  3. Sending it to others needs a reason. In 2022 a court in Munich ordered a website to pay a visitor €100 because its pages loaded fonts from Google, passing his IP address to Google without his consent. A form page that loads a third party’s scripts does the same.

The GDPR asks for the opposite habit: collect what you need for the purpose, and nothing more. It calls this data minimisation, in Article 5.

How to check your own forms

  1. Export a few responses and look at every column. Note the ones you never asked for.
  2. Look at the form’s settings for options such as “collect IP addresses” or “record location”. Some tools have them on by default.
  3. Open the form with your browser’s developer tools (F12), on the Network tab, and reload. Every domain that isn’t the form tool’s own received your IP address.
  4. Read the tool’s list of sub-processors: the companies it shares data with, and where they are.

What Agent002 keeps

We built Agent002 to keep the answers and nothing else:

  • A response has no IP address, browser, device or location in it. There is no column to switch on.
  • Our spam checks look at the IP address in memory for about a minute, to slow down floods. It isn’t written to disk or stored with answers, and our web server keeps no access log.
  • Public forms load nothing from other companies, so no one else gets a request from the person filling them in.
  • Answers delete themselves after a period you choose, from 30 days to a year depending on the plan.

If you’d like to see it for yourself, run the checks above on one of our forms.