Everything the plugin records stays in your own WordPress database, on your own domain. No referral data is sent anywhere, and no request leaves your site to us in order to track a visit.
What is stored#
- Visits — the referrer, the landing URL, the campaign, a timestamp and the visitor’s IP address.
- Referrals — the order reference, the amount, the affiliate and the status.
- Affiliates — the WordPress user, their status, and their payout preference and its details.
Retention: the IP is cleared, the visit isn’t deleted#
Set a retention window under Settings → Privacy, in days. This does not delete visit rows — it runs a daily scheduled job that clears the stored IP address on any visit older than the window, while leaving the rest of the row (referrer, landing page, campaign, and whether it converted into a referral) exactly as it was. That’s a deliberate trade: the address is the part that identifies a person, so it’s the part that gets removed, while the rest keeps your conversion reporting and click history intact indefinitely. A retention window of zero — the default — keeps IPs indefinitely; there’s no automatic clearing until you set a window.
Referral rows are never touched by this job at all, at any window setting, because they’re financial records you’ll need for longer than you need click-level detail — a referral’s amount, status and order reference stay exactly as recorded regardless of your IP retention setting.
You are the controller#
For your affiliates and their referred customers, you are the data controller — not us. The plugin registers WordPress’s own exporter and eraser, so an access or erasure request submitted through Tools → Export Personal Data or Erase Personal Data covers affiliate and referral records without you writing SQL. A data export matched by email returns the affiliate’s own account details (ID, status, payout email) plus every referral recorded against them — amount, status and date, up to a thousand rows in one pass.
Erasure and money owed#
Erasing a person who is owed money is a genuine conflict: you have an obligation to pay them and an obligation to erase them. The eraser resolves this by anonymising rather than deleting — the affiliate’s status is moved to rejected and their payout email is cleared, while the referral rows behind them (amount, status, date) are kept intact for your accounting records. That’s the position most regulators take: identifying detail goes, the financial trail that justifies what was paid and why stays. If a request is contested — an affiliate insists their referral history itself must go, not just their contact details — that’s a question for your lawyer, not something a settings screen resolves for you.
Cookies#
The referral cookie is first-party and functional — it exists to remember who referred a visitor, not to track them across other sites. Whether it needs consent where you operate depends on your jurisdiction and your own reading of it; the cookie name, the query parameter it responds to, and its default window are all documented and filterable under Settings → Tracking, so you can state exactly what the cookie is and how long it lasts if you need to document it in a privacy policy.