---
title: "What never goes in an event"
description: "Event properties hold counts, flags and fixed choices. Emails, names and anything a person typed belong elsewhere or nowhere."
canonical: "https://www.togohq.ai/docs/concepts/personal-data"
applies_to: "Every Togo SDK"
updated: "2026-11-03T00:00:00Z"
---

# What never goes in an event

Event properties hold counts, flags and fixed choices. Emails, names and anything a person typed belong elsewhere or nowhere.

## Send facts about the action, not about the person

Good event properties are booleans, counts, bucketed lengths and values from a fixed list:

```ts
analytics.track('message_sent', {
  has_attachment: true,
  recipients: 3,
  length_bucket: '100-500',
  channel: 'email',
});
```

**Never put these in an event property:** an email address, a name, a phone number, an address,
or any text a person typed — a search query, a message, a form field.

## Where identifying facts go instead

On the **person**, not the event. Pass your user id to `identify()`, and put traits such as an
email or a plan on the profile with `setPersonProperties()`
([Set person properties](/docs/guides/person-properties)). A person's profile is one record, so
erasing somebody is a targeted delete. The same email in event properties would be in every file
they ever appeared in.

## What Togo catches, and what it cannot

- Property values are primitives only — strings, numbers, booleans, `null` — with no nesting, at
  most 1,024 characters a value and 256 properties an event.
- With **Drop email addresses from event properties** turned on (project Settings → Event
  governance, or `update_project` with `piiFilterEnabled`), a property whose key or value contains
  an email address is **dropped** before it is stored. It is off by default: properties are stored
  as sent, and turning it on does not remove what is already stored.
- The browser SDK replaces an email address in a page path, referrer or campaign value with
  `REDACTED_EMAIL`, and never sends the query string or the `#fragment`.
- While you test with a test key, the [diagnostics](/docs/reference/event-diagnostics) on each
  event warn you when a property, a `userId` or a session id looks like an email address, so your
  agent can take it out before you ship.

Nothing can recognise every kind of personal data — a phone number or a name in a free-text
property is not detected. Keeping it out is yours to do, as a term of use: Togo does not ask for
it and does not promise that none ever arrives.

## Consent is separate

Whether you may collect analytics from a visitor at all is a consent question for your site, and
the browser SDK gives you the switch: [Connect a consent banner](/docs/guides/consent).