# Privacy - Searchline 1.x documentation

> What the search report keeps and doesn't, how long, and the privacy tools Searchline adds to WordPress.

Searchline counts searches, not people. The search report holds the words searched for and how often, never who searched.

## What is kept

For each day and search: the words, how many times they were searched, how many results they found and how many results were clicked. That's all.

Searches you [ignore in the report](search-report) are kept as a list of words, with nothing else. An ignored search is forgotten together with its counts.

What is never kept:

- IP addresses, accounts, sessions or browsers;
- searches that look like an email address, or a phone or card number (8 digits or more);
- searches by search engines and other crawlers.

Searches are stored in lowercase and cut to 100 characters.

## How long

Go to **WooCommerce → Searchline → Settings → Search report and privacy** and set **Keep the counts for 90 days** (1 to 730). Older days are deleted once a day.

![Set up the live dropdown, protect the server from too many searches and choose how long the search report keeps its counts.](https://storage.extendiment.com/media/1280/screenshot-5.png)

To stop counting altogether, untick **Count what visitors search for**. To delete everything now, click **Empty the search report** on the **Search report** tab and confirm. That deletes the ignored searches too.

## The live search limit

To protect your server, the dropdown allows each visitor a number of searches per minute (see [Live search](live-search)). Visitors are told apart by a code made from their IP address and the current minute, which changes every minute and expires with it. The IP address itself is never stored.

## Your privacy policy

Searchline suggests text for your privacy policy. Go to **Settings → Privacy**, open the **Policy Guide**, and find the **Searchline** section. The suggested text says what is counted, that IP addresses aren't stored, that personal-looking searches aren't kept and that counts are deleted after a set number of days. Copy it into your policy and adjust it if you need to.

## Export and erase requests

Searchline joins WordPress's own tools under **Tools → Export Personal Data** and **Tools → Erase Personal Data**, as "Searchline search report". Since searches aren't linked to anyone, it looks for searches that contain the person's email address, in case one was ever kept in another form, and exports or deletes them. Ignored searches are included.

## Related

- [Search report](search-report)

Source: https://extendiment.com/plugins/searchline/docs/1.x/privacy