What Datadog means for your app's privacy disclosures

Datadog is a crash and performance monitor. What it involves, whether it needs the tracking prompt, what goes on the App Store labels and the Play Data safety form, and the rejection it is usually behind.

Updated 2026-09-18 · Written from the same rules terms.gg uses to generate documents

What Datadog actually does

Infrastructure monitoring extended to mobile real user monitoring and session replay.

What its job necessarily involves

These follow from what the thing is for, so they are true whichever version you installed:

• Performance and error telemetry with device context.
• Session recordings where RUM replay is enabled, with the same masking problem as any replay tool.

What to open and check in Datadog

The settings below decide what the honest answer on the forms is, and they are specific to this SDK rather than to its category:

• Whether mobile real user monitoring is enabled, separately from your backend monitoring.
• Whether session replay masking covers form fields.

Datadog does not need the tracking prompt

A stack trace is not an advertising identifier, and nothing here follows anyone anywhere. So Datadog does not on its own require App Tracking Transparency. That is a statement about this SDK, not about your app: add one ad network or one attribution tool and the prompt applies to everything.

Datadog in Europe: defensible under legitimate interests

Keeping an app from crashing is a real interest of yours and of the person using it, so crash and performance monitoring is one of the easier things to justify under legitimate interests. That is not a free pass: you still have to write down the assessment, say so in the policy, and keep what you collect to what a fix needs.

Datadog in California: probably not a sale

Datadog does its job for you rather than for its own commercial purposes, which normally keeps it a service provider rather than a sale. That depends on your contract saying so, and the standard terms usually do.

Datadog on the App Store privacy labels

Apple asks what your app collects, and your app collects whatever its SDKs collect. Datadog is generally declared under App Functionality, alongside whatever the rest of your app does for its own reasons.

Datadog on the Google Play Data safety form

The form asks two things the labels do not: whether data is shared with anyone else, and whether it is encrypted in transit. For this SDK the honest answer is usually collected but not shared, because it processes on your behalf.

Check Datadog's own privacy manifest for Datadog

Since 2024 Apple has required third-party SDKs on its list to ship a signed privacy manifest declaring what they collect and which sensitive APIs they use, and your app's combined manifest is built from them. That file is the authoritative answer for Datadog, it comes from Datadog, and it changes when they ship.

The rejection Datadog is usually behind

Mobile RUM was enabled alongside the backend monitoring and never entered on the privacy labels.

What to put in the privacy policy about Datadog

• Datadog named as a processor or a recipient, not hidden behind "our partners".
• What it is for, in a sentence someone would understand without knowing what an SDK is.
• Where it runs, and what makes a transfer outside your region lawful.
• How long the data is kept, which is a question the vendor documents and most policies skip.
• That it processes on your instructions rather than for its own purposes.

Keeping it true after launch

A legal page stops being true the moment the product moves past it, usually by adding a payment provider, an analytics SDK or a sign-in. No store re-checks your pages against your build, so the drift is yours to notice.

• Re-read it whenever you add a dependency that sees user data.
• Re-check what loads on the page after any change: the cookie notice and the policy have to agree.
• Keep the URL stable. Changing where a policy lives breaks every listing that points at it.