---
title: Filtering sensitive data
description: Filter sensitive data from Ruby error reports to protect user privacy and comply with security requirements.
url: https://docs.honeybadger.io/lib/ruby/errors/filtering-sensitive-data/
---

You have complete control over the data that Honeybadger reports when an error occurs. You can [filter specific attributes](https://docs.honeybadger.io/lib/ruby/errors/filtering-sensitive-data/#filtering-specific-attributes) or [disable the reporting](https://docs.honeybadger.io/lib/ruby/errors/filtering-sensitive-data/#disable-data-completely) of entire sections of data.

## Filtering specific attributes

By default, we filter the `password` and `password_confirmation`, as well as any params specified in Rails’ [`filter_parameters`](https://guides.rubyonrails.org/action_controller_overview.html#parameters-filtering).

You can configure the gem to filter additional data from the params, session, environment and cookies hashes. To do so, use the `request.filter_keys` setting.

When you add an attribute name to `request.filter_keys`, that attribute will be removed from any exceptions before they are reported to us.

Here’s an example honeybadger.yml:

```yaml
request:
  filter_keys:
    - password
    - password_confirmation
    - credit_card_number
```

The configuration above will filter out `params[:credit_card_number]`, `session[:credit_card_number]`, `cookies[:credit_card_number]`, and `Rails.env["credit_card_number"]`, as well as the password and password\_confirmation attributes.

Regular expressions (regex) are also allowed. The configuration below will filter out any keys that are named anything matching `/credit_card/i`.

```yaml
request:
  filter_keys:
    - !ruby/regexp "/credit_card/i"
```

## Disable data completely

You can turn off reporting of params, session and environment data entirely. Here are the configuration options to do it:

```yaml
request:
  disable_session: true # Don't report session data
  disable_params: true # Don't report request params
  disable_environment: true # Don't report anything from Rack ENV
  disable_url: true # Don't report the request URL
```

---

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