Consent Exemption Mode

Privacy regulations such as GDPR require that you collect user consent before loading any third-party tracking tool, including Screeb. In practice, this means that visitors who decline (or never see) your consent banner are not tracked at all — Screeb does not load for them.

For most products this is the right default. But some organizations are exempt from the consent requirement by law: public-sector websites, internal tools used exclusively by employees, or any service that processes data strictly necessary to provide the service, without any profiling purpose. These organizations can legally load Screeb for every visitor, no consent banner required.

Consent Exemption Mode is designed exactly for this situation. When you turn it on, Screeb loads for every visitor unconditionally — but to stay lawful under the exemption, it does so without collecting any personal data. All identity tracking is silently disabled, and all visitors are treated as entirely anonymous.

What changes when you enable it

When Consent Exemption Mode is active, Screeb enforces these constraints automatically — you do not need to change your integration code.

Identity tracking is disabled

Any call to $screeb('identity', ...) or $screeb('identity.properties', ...) is silently ignored. Screeb will not link a session to a user profile, no matter what your integration code does. A warning is logged to the browser console so developers can see what is happening, but no error is thrown.

This means:

• Visitors are never linked to a name, email address, or any internal user ID you pass
• User properties (plan, role, account age, etc.) are not stored
• Targeting rules that rely on user identity or user properties have no effect

Session Replay is disabled

Session Replay records what individual users do on your website. That is incompatible with full anonymity, so it is automatically turned off when Consent Exemption Mode is enabled. The Session Replay toggle in your workspace settings becomes unavailable and cannot be turned on while the mode is active.

Surveys still work — anonymously

Screeb continues to display surveys to your visitors. Responses are collected and available in your dashboard. The only difference is that no response is ever linked to a named user — every respondent appears as an anonymous visitor.

Targeting rules that are based on pages visited, events triggered, or visitor behaviour (but not user identity) continue to work normally.

MAU impact

Depending on your traffic volume, this can significantly increase your MAU consumption compared to a workspace where users are identified.

Enabling Consent Exemption Mode

Consent Exemption Mode is a workspace-level setting. Changing it applies immediately to every new session in that workspace.

1. Open the Screeb admin interface and navigate to your workspace.
2. Go to Settings → Behaviour.
3. Find the Consent exemption mode toggle and switch it on.
4. Confirm the change. If Session Replay was enabled, it will be turned off automatically as part of the same save.

Once saved, the toggle for Ignore anonymous users becomes locked to "off" and shows a message explaining that Consent Exemption Mode controls it. This prevents accidentally blocking the anonymous visitors that the mode is designed to reach.

Disabling Consent Exemption Mode

Turning the mode off restores all previous behavior:

• Identity tracking resumes. Calls to $screeb('identity', ...) and $screeb('identity.properties', ...) are processed normally again.
• Session Replay can be re-enabled manually in its own settings section.
• The Ignore anonymous users toggle becomes editable again.

No historical data is changed. Responses collected while the mode was active remain anonymous — they cannot be retroactively attributed to user profiles.

How it interacts with your integration code

You do not need to guard your identity calls with a conditional. When the mode is active, Screeb simply ignores those calls server-side and in the tag itself. Your existing integration continues to work as-is; the only change is that the identity information never reaches Screeb.

If you want to make the behavior explicit in your code for readability, you can check your own feature flag before calling identity, but it is not required.

// This call is safe to leave in your code even with Consent Exemption Mode on.
// Screeb will silently ignore it when the mode is active.
$screeb('identity', userId, {
  email: userEmail,
  plan: userPlan,
});

Frequently asked questions

Can I enable Consent Exemption Mode on some channels and not others?

No. Consent Exemption Mode is a workspace-level setting that applies to all channels in the workspace. If you need different behavior across channels, use separate workspaces.

Does this affect how I load the Screeb tag?

No. The tag installation is unchanged. You can (and often will) remove your consent-gating logic so that the tag loads unconditionally, but the tag code itself does not change.

Can I still use targeting rules?

Yes, as long as the rules do not depend on user identity or user properties. Page URL, event-based rules, and session-level conditions continue to work. Rules like "user email contains @acme.com" will never match because no email is ever stored.

What happens to sessions that started before I enabled the mode?

Active sessions are not interrupted. The constraint applies to new sessions that start after the setting is saved.

Is the anonymous respondent ID stored anywhere?

Screeb still assigns a temporary anonymous ID per session so that it can link survey answers within the same visit. This ID is not linked to any persistent profile and is reset after 30 minutes of inactivity. It is never shared with your application code.

Updated on: 30/04/2026