Privacy Policy: Your Data and Rights

This English translation is provided for convenience. In case of any discrepancy, the French version prevails.

At a glance

This website contains no third-party audience measurement tool (only clicks on partner links are counted, anonymously, see section 1), no advertising cookie, no social media button, and no external font.
We only collect data when you buy a license, write to us, subscribe to the newsletter, post a comment or join the affiliate program.
Our emails (newsletter, emails to customers, account and service emails) may measure whether they are opened and which links are clicked, without storing any IP address; each one contains a one-click unsubscribe link (see section 6).
If you arrive through an affiliate link, a functional cookie remembers which link brought you, so that the affiliate can be credited. It contains no personal data (see section 1).
Payments are processed by Stripe: we never see your card number.
We do not sell or rent any data.

Data controller

Jean-Edouard Hueber EI, sole proprietor, 22 rue de la Chapelle, 26140 Anneyron, France. Contact: via our contact form.

1. Visiting the website

The website does not place any cookie on visitors' computers, with one exception: if you arrive through an affiliate's link, two functional cookies are set to credit that affiliate with the commission (see section 7). Technical cookies are also used for people logged in to the website's administration area.

Cookie	Purpose	Content	Lifetime
`wpm_ref`	First-party, strictly functional: crediting the commission to the affiliate whose link you followed. Set only when you arrive through an affiliate link.	A random link reference and a signature, no personal data	30 days
`wpm_ref_c`	First-party: counting the click only once.	Same	A few minutes

Like any web server, the hosting service records technical logs (IP address, date, requested page, browser) to keep the website secure and running properly. Legal basis: legitimate interest. Retention period: 12 months.

Clicks on partner links and cards. To report to our partners (footer links, "Sponsored" cards), we count how many times these links are displayed and clicked. This measurement works without cookies or any storage in your browser and without personal data: your browser only sends the number of the link, its placement and the language of the page, and we keep nothing but daily totals.

No IP address is stored; a fingerprint of the IP address, renewed every day, is used for 30 minutes only to discard double counts and abuse, then deleted. Robots are not counted. These figures cannot identify you or follow your browsing; they are never combined with other data and partners only receive totals. This strictly limited and anonymous measurement falls under the consent exemption for audience measurement defined by the French data protection authority (CNIL). Links lead straight to the partner's website, with no redirect through our servers. Legal basis: legitimate interest.

WordPress detector

When you analyse a site with the WordPress detector, we use the address you enter only to query that site, and a hash of your IP address (never the address in clear text) to limit the number of analyses and block abuse. The analysed site sees requests from our server, identified as coming from the detector, not your IP address. Legal bases: performance of your request (Article 6(1)(b) GDPR) and legitimate interest in protecting the service (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR).

Analysis result: cached for 10 minutes so the analysed site is not queried again, then deleted. It contains the analysed domain name, not the full address entered, and any usernames found are masked;
Anti-abuse counters: hash of the IP address, deleted after 24 hours at the latest;
Share link: created only if you click “Share”. The report snapshot is kept for 30 days, is not indexed by search engines and can be deleted at any time with the button shown when it is created;
Versions and vulnerabilities: the name and version of the WordPress core, plugins and theme detected are sent to the public APIs of version and vulnerability databases, without your IP address or the address of the analysed site. Their responses are cached (7 days for versions, 12 hours for vulnerabilities);
WP Masquerade Pro customers: the analyses you save in your account (20 at most, only for sites activated with your license) are kept until you delete them or your account is deleted. The report sent by email goes only to your account address and contains a share link valid for 30 days.

2. Buying a license

When you make a purchase, the following data is processed:

Data	Where	Why
Email, name, billing address, payment data	Stripe (checkout page, invoices, subscription)	Collect the payment, issue the invoice, manage the subscription
Email, plan, Stripe identifiers (customer, subscription, payment), license key (encrypted), license dates	Seller's license server	Create and send your key, manage the license and the customer area
License history: sale, renewal, refund, activations	Seller's license server	Contract follow-up, support, dispute handling
Business billing details (optional): company name, SIRET number, intra-EU VAT number, billing address, billing email, phone number, purchase order reference	Customer area, Stripe (customer record, invoices) and Seller's license server	Issue compliant invoices, pre-fill the checkout page

Legal basis: performance of the contract and legal obligations (accounting). The email containing your key is sent by o2switch (France).

Stripe acts as a payment service provider and, for certain purposes (fraud prevention, regulatory obligations), as a data controller. Its processing is described in its own privacy policy. Data may be transferred to the United States, subject to the safeguards provided for by the GDPR (RGPD in French) (standard contractual clauses, EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework).

Business billing details (optional)

If you buy for a company, you can provide additional billing details when you register (the “I am buying for a company” option), in the “Billing” tab of your customer area, or on the Stripe checkout page:

company name;
SIRET number (French business identification number);
intra-EU VAT number;
billing address (street, postcode, city, country);
billing email;
phone number;
purchase order reference.

Purposes: issuing compliant invoices and pre-filling the Stripe checkout page (customer name and address, tax ID). Your SIRET number, VAT number and purchase order reference are printed on your invoices.

Legal bases: performance of the contract (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR) and compliance with our legal accounting obligations (Art. 6(1)(c) GDPR); invoices are kept for 10 years (Article L123-22 of the French Commercial Code).

Recipients: Stripe, our payment service provider, which creates the customer record and issues the invoices; our license server, which stores these details with your licenses and shows them only in the Seller’s back office.

These fields are optional. You can edit or erase them at any time in the “Billing” tab of your customer area. Erasing them does not delete invoices already issued, which we must keep to meet our legal obligations.

Reminders before your license ends

If your license does not renew automatically (subscription cancelled or ended, one-time payment with an end date, license created manually), the site sends you a few e-mail reminders before it ends: by default 30, 15, 10, 5 and 3 days before, then on the day itself, never more than one a day. To do so, our license server tells the site once a day which licenses are about to end: license reference, e-mail address, plan, end date, number of sites and language of your last order. The reminder is written in your language and contains a personal renewal link, which asks you to sign in to your account.

The site keeps a log of these e-mails (license reference, e-mail address, step, date, language and result) so that the same reminder is never sent twice; it is kept for 2 years. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in sparing you an interruption of service and in offering the renewal of a product you already use (art. L34-5 of the French Postal and Electronic Communications Code). You can stop these reminders at any time, in one click, with the "Stop these reminders" link found in every e-mail, or in the profile of your member area.

Subscriptions that renew automatically do not receive these reminders but the notice required by article L215-1 of the French Consumer Code, sent by our license server about 60 days before the renewal. This notice is a legal obligation: it is sent even if you stopped the reminders.

3. Using WP Masquerade Pro

When you activate your license, the plugin installed on your site exchanges the following information with our license server:

the domain name of the activated site;
the site language (the WordPress locale, for example fr_FR);
on the first activation, the activation code generated in your member area for the site address;
the plugin version and the identifier of the downloaded copy;
an activation identifier (its secret is stored only as a hash);
the activation date and the date of the last check;
an installation identifier: a one-way hash of the site address, its database name and its table prefix, used to recognise a copy of the site (these values are never sent in clear text);
the result of the plugin's integrity check: number and names of the plugin files that were modified, added or are missing.

These exchanges take place at activation, during the daily license check, the daily retrieval of the signature feed and of the disguised plugins catalogue updates, and checks for updates. No data about your site's visitors is transmitted. Each downloaded copy of the plugin contains an identifier specific to the license, which makes it possible to detect unauthorized distribution of the key (legitimate interest).

When a copy of an activated site (a backup restored elsewhere, Duplicator, staging) checks in with the activation of the original, or when a copy of the plugin tied to a license asks for updates on a site without a license, the server records the domain name of that copy, kept for 6 months at most, to show it to you in your member area and to fight unlawful copies of the plugin (legitimate interest). Update checks send the site's domain name and the identifier of the downloaded copy, even before activation.

To protect the server against abuse, the number of requests per IP address is limited; this counter uses a hash of the address, never the address in clear text, and is deleted after about 24 hours.

The WP Masquerade Pro integrity check also queries the official public WordPress API to obtain the official list of WordPress files: only the WordPress version and language are included in this request, which is not sent to us.

The free version of WP Masquerade, for its part, sends no data to any third-party service: its diagnostics stay local.

Update status of your sites (member area)

While the license is active, the plugin also sends our license server, once a day and a few minutes after updates, the update status of the site: WordPress and PHP versions, the plugins and themes waiting for an update (name, installed and available versions, automatic updates on or off) and the number of known vulnerabilities found by its vulnerability scan. It contains no visitor or user data, no content and no address other than the domain already linked to the license. We use it only to show you this status in your member area (performance of the contract).

Only the latest status of each site is kept; it is erased when the site is released or deactivated. You can turn this off on each site (WP Masquerade settings, Pro license tab): the site then sends nothing more and asks our server to erase the stored status. The weekly summary e-mail of the sites needing updates is only sent if you ask for it in your profile, and you can stop it there at any time.

Agency features (security overview, client groups, settings profiles)

If the site owner also turns on the security overview (WP Masquerade settings, Pro license tab, Agency management, off by default), the daily update status also contains: masking on or off and its levels, the imitated software, whether the login address is hidden, whether two-step verification is required for administrators, for other roles only or for nobody, the number of security headers, bot traps and file aliases on or off, the result of the WordPress file integrity check, the number of newly activated plugins or themes still showing traces, and a score computed from them. No user, address, file name or content. It is stored and erased with the update status.

For the agency features of the license holder, our license server stores, linked to the e-mail address of the licenses: the client groups and their names, the settings profiles uploaded (WP Masquerade settings only, never passwords or keys), the group and profile of each site with the delivery state of its profile, the agency name and support page, and the white-label options of each license. A site receives a settings profile or the white-label only if its owner allows it in the same card; it then tells our server whether the profile was applied. The agency logo is stored on wp-masquerade.com and the monthly report is e-mailed only on request (Agency tab of the member area, where it can be stopped). Purpose: provide the member area features you use (performance of the contract). These data are kept while the licenses exist and are deleted with your account; a released site loses its group and profile.

Fraud prevention for licenses

Purpose: detecting the sharing or resale of licenses (for example “group buys”, where one license is split between many unrelated buyers) and protecting the license model. Legal basis: legitimate interest (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).

Data used:

the site language (the WordPress locale, for example fr_FR), sent by the plugin at activation;
a truncated network prefix of the IP address of the server that hosts the site: the first two bytes of an IPv4 address (a /16) or the first 32 bits of an IPv6 address. The full IP address is never stored for this purpose;
the two-letter country code derived from that address, only when a local geolocation database is configured on the server;
activation codes: site address (and folder), creation, expiry and use dates, status;
refused activations and the copy, move and unauthorised distribution signals described above.

Processing: these data feed a suspicion score per license, based on the number of active sites compared to the plan, the pace of new sites, the diversity of countries, domain extensions, networks and languages, released or moved sites, refused activations, unauthorised distribution signals, and the number of codes generated compared to codes used. No decision is automated: a high score only alerts the Seller, who reviews the license and may contact you; a license is never revoked automatically because of this score.

Retention: activation codes are deleted 90 days after they expire, are used or are revoked; network prefixes, country codes and site languages are kept while the site is activated, and at most 12 months in the license history; the score is recalculated and not archived. You can exercise your rights, including your right to object, as described in section 9.

4. Data processed by the plugin on your own sites

Some WP Masquerade features process data on your site, under your sole responsibility; this data is not transmitted to us:

Trap log (Pro): date, requested URL, truncated IP address (IPv4 /24, IPv6 /48), and declared browser, kept for 30 days at most;
Banning and login attempt limiting (Pro): hash (HMAC) of the IP address, never the address in clear text, deleted on expiry;
Two-factor authentication (Pro): encrypted secret and backup codes stored as hashes, in each user's profile;
Email alerts (Pro): hash of a random cookie for each administrator's last 10 browsers, number of failed logins per day (without IP address) for 60 days; the emails sent contain the truncated IP address and the short browser name, never a password or username;
Administrator activity log (Pro): date, the user’s username and role, action, item concerned and truncated IP address (IPv4 /24, IPv6 /48), kept for 30 to 365 days depending on your setting (90 by default); never a password or secret;
Vulnerable plugin alerts (Pro): the names (slugs) and versions of the plugins and themes and the WordPress version are sent to our license server, which queries a public vulnerability database and keeps no list per site (only a shared cache per plugin, 12 hours, and the date of each activation's last check); never the site's content;
Trap counters (free): requested URLs and number of requests.

Remember to mention this processing in your own site's privacy policy (suggested legal basis: legitimate interest, site security).

5. Contact form, newsletter and comments

Contact form

The contact form collects your last name, your first name, your company name (optional), your email address, the subject of your message, chosen from a list, and its text, as well as the text of the consent box you ticked. The message is sent by email to the Seller, and a copy is kept privately in the site’s WordPress administration, accessible only to the Seller, together with the language of the page, a handling status (new, read, replied, archived) and an internal history of how it was handled (status changes, reply date, the Seller’s notes). Your email address is used to reply to you and to send you an automatic acknowledgement in your language; this acknowledgement never repeats the content of your message. Legal basis: your consent and our legitimate interest in answering your request.

Messages received through the form are kept for 12 months, then deleted automatically by a daily task on the site. If the conversation continues by email, we keep our exchanges for as long as needed to reply and follow up on your request, then delete them no later than 3 years after our last exchange.

Protection against bots

The contact form, the newsletter form and the comment form are protected by an invisible trap field, a signed token, a minimum time between displaying the form and submitting it, and a limit on the number of submissions. This limit relies on a hash of your IP address, never the address in clear text: the counter is deleted after about an hour, and the hash is also stored with your message or subscription.

By default, the anti-bot check is performed by your browser, without any third-party service: it runs a small calculation (proof of work); if JavaScript is disabled, you answer a simple arithmetic question instead. If the Seller has enabled it, this check is handled by Cloudflare Turnstile or hCaptcha: the chosen service is then loaded only on pages that contain a form and receives technical data from your browser, including your IP address, to tell a human from a bot, under its own privacy policy.

Contact form messages also go through an automatic analysis. Your email address is checked: disposable addresses are refused and the existence of the domain is verified with a DNS lookup. The content of the message (links, wording typical of unwanted messages, an identical message already received in the last 24 hours) is used to calculate a spam score. A message judged to be unwanted is not forwarded to the Seller and triggers no acknowledgement: it is kept for 30 days in the site’s administration with the status “Spam”, so that a message flagged by mistake can be recovered, then deleted automatically. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in protecting the site and its inbox against abuse.

If the Seller enables the Akismet service (Automattic, United States), your message may also be submitted to it to detect spam: Akismet then receives your first and last name, your email address, the text of the message, your IP address and technical data from your browser (browser type, referring page). This data may be transferred outside the European Union, with appropriate safeguards, according to Automattic’s privacy policy (opens in a new tab).

If you subscribe to the newsletter, we record your email address, your language, the text of the consent you accepted and its date, and a hash of your IP address. Subscription uses double opt-in: it only becomes active once you click the confirmation link sent to you by email. The newsletter, sent about once a month, presents the vulnerabilities we have found and the latest blog articles, as well as announcements and promotions. Every newsletter contains an unsubscribe link. Legal basis: your consent, which you can withdraw at any time. How the newsletter is sent, how its audience is measured and how you choose which emails you receive are described in section 6.

Subscriptions are stored on this site. If the Seller uses an external mailing service (for example Brevo or Mailchimp), the form sends your address directly to that provider, which then handles confirmation and unsubscription and processes your data under its own privacy policy.

Comments

When comments are open on blog articles, the form asks for your name, your email address and your comment; there is no “website” field. Your name and comment are published; your email address never is. Comments may be reviewed before publication (moderation). Like any WordPress site, the site also records the IP address and browser of a comment’s author, to fight abuse. Legal basis: your consent (checkbox) and our legitimate interest in moderating discussions. You can ask for a comment to be edited or deleted via our contact form.

6. Information and service emails, audience measurement

The website sends its own emails from its WordPress installation, through o2switch (France). There are three kinds:

Newsletter: the monthly newsletter (vulnerabilities found, latest blog articles, announcements and promotions), sent only to people who subscribed and confirmed their subscription (double opt-in). Legal basis: your consent;
Emails to customers: if you have bought a license, we may write to you about similar products and services (new versions, tips for using the product, promotions on WP Masquerade licenses), as allowed by article L34-5 of the French Postal and Electronic Communications Code. Legal basis: our legitimate interest. Each of these emails lets you opt out of further emails easily and free of charge;
Account and service emails: a welcome email after you create an account, getting-started tips a few days after a purchase, an email when a license is close to its site limit, a reminder when a checkout was started while signed in but not completed (one reminder about 1 hour later and possibly a second one 7 days later; only for signed-in members, never for anonymous visitors), and a request for a review about 60 days after a purchase. Legal basis: performance of the contract and our legitimate interest in helping you use the product. Those that are not essential can be stopped at any time.

Essential service information, such as information about the security of the product or changes to the terms, may be sent to customers even without consent to marketing.

Data used

To decide whom to write to and to write each email in your language, the website uses:

your email address, your first name and your language;
your country, taken from the billing details in your member area or, failing that, deduced from your language;
your customer data from our license server: plan, license status and dates, number of sites used compared with the number allowed, purchase dates, checkouts started;
your newsletter subscription status and your email preferences.

Measuring opens and clicks

If the Seller keeps this setting on (it can be turned off), each marketing or service email contains a personal invisible image (tracking pixel) and links that go through the website (redirect). They record whether the email was opened and which link was clicked, with the date and time. No IP address and no browser identifier is stored for this measurement. Opens are only estimates: some email apps load images automatically (for example Apple Mail with Mail Privacy Protection).

This measurement helps us know which emails are useful, send fewer useless emails and produce statistics by country and language. Legal basis: our legitimate interest (audience measurement of our emails). You can object by unsubscribing or by turning off images in your email app.

Unsubscribing, preferences and retention

Every email contains an unsubscribe link that works in one click. The website also supports the one-click “List-Unsubscribe” header, which many email apps show as an unsubscribe button. A preferences page, opened from the emails without signing in, lets you choose what you receive, category by category:

newsletter and promotions;
product tips and news;
reminders about unfinished orders;
review requests;
renewal reminders (members).

The sending log and the open and click statistics linked to a recipient are kept for 13 months, then deleted or made anonymous (only totals are kept). Addresses that unsubscribed, bounced or reported an email as spam are added to a suppression list, stored as a hash of the address where possible, so that they are never emailed again. Retention periods are listed in section 8; you also have the rights described in section 9.

7. Affiliate program

If you join the affiliate program, or if you arrive on the website through an affiliate's link, the following data is processed.

Affiliate data

your member account (name, email address) and your affiliate status, with the date and version of the terms you accepted;
your tracked links (the name you give them and their random reference) and their statistics: clicks, sign-ups, purchases, commissions;
your payout details: account holder and IBAN, stored encrypted and only ever shown masked (for example its last four characters), or your PayPal email address;
your commission and payout history, and the invoices you send us if you are a business.

Referral tracking

When a visitor arrives through an affiliate link, we record the click (link concerned, date) and set the wpm_ref cookie described in section 1. If the visitor then creates an account, we record the link that referred them and their sign-up date: this link to the affiliate is permanent and is used to calculate commissions on their purchases during the commission window. A hash of the IP address (never the address in clear) is stored with the click and the sign-up, only to detect fraud such as self-referral or fake clicks.

What affiliates see

Affiliates never see the identity, email address or website of the members they refer. Their dashboard only shows a pseudonymous label (for example "Member #7KQ2"), the sign-up date, the number of purchases and the commission on each purchase.

Legal bases and recipients

Performance of the contract (art. 6.1.b GDPR) to manage the affiliate account, commissions and payouts; legal obligations (art. 6.1.c GDPR) for accounting records; legitimate interest (art. 6.1.f GDPR) to attribute referrals and prevent fraud. Payouts go through your bank or PayPal, which process this data under their own privacy policies. Retention periods are listed in section 8.

8. Retention periods

License data: for the duration of the license, then 5 years (general limitation period under French law);
Invoices and accounting records: 10 years (legal obligation);
Business billing details: until you edit or erase them in the Billing tab; details printed on an invoice already issued are kept for 10 years with that invoice;
Contact form messages: 12 months, then automatic deletion;
Messages classified as spam: 30 days, then automatic deletion;
Newsletter: until you unsubscribe; the address is then kept with an “unsubscribed” status, only so that we no longer write to you; on request it is deleted and only its hash remains in the suppression list (below);
Comments: as long as the article is online, unless you ask for deletion;
Submission limit counters: about one hour;
Affiliate account and tracked links: while you take part in the program; after you leave, only the commission history is kept (below);
Affiliate payout details (IBAN, PayPal address): until you change or delete them, or until your participation ends;
Affiliate commissions and payouts: 10 years (accounting records);
Link between a member and the affiliate link that referred them: as long as the member account exists;
IP address hashes of clicks and sign-ups through affiliate links: 12 months at most;
Update status of a site: only the latest one, until the site is released or monitoring is turned off on it;
Activation codes: 90 days after they expire, are used or are revoked, then deletion;
Network prefixes, country codes and site languages (fraud prevention): while the site is activated, and at most 12 months in the license history;
Renewal reminder log: 2 years, then automatic deletion;
Email sending log and open and click statistics linked to a recipient: 13 months, then deletion or anonymization (only totals are kept);
Suppression list (addresses that unsubscribed, bounced or reported an email as spam), stored as a hash where possible: as long as needed to respect your choice, and at least 3 years after the last contact;
Email preferences: as long as your account or subscription exists;
WordPress detector: analysis result 10 minutes; anti-abuse counters 24 hours; share links 30 days; analyses saved by Pro customers until they or the account are deleted;
Technical logs: see section 1.

9. Your rights

You have the right to access, rectify, erase, restrict the processing of, object to the processing of, and port your data, as well as the right to set instructions regarding what happens to your data after your death. To exercise these rights, write to us via our contact form. However, some data must be kept to comply with our legal obligations.

For emails, you can also unsubscribe in one click or choose which emails you receive on the preferences page (see section 6).

If you believe your rights are not being respected, you can file a complaint with the CNIL, the French data protection authority (cnil.fr).

Last updated: October 29, 2026.

Privacy policy