The day someone misuses your guest WiFi, your portal log becomes the most important file in the building. The day a guest asks what you record about them, your terms page becomes the most important paragraph. Both deserve ten honest minutes before you need them.
A captive portal is a record-keeping system that happens to hand out internet access. On Untangle, the Captive Portal app tracks sessions and the platform's Reports tie network activity to the username the portal collected — which is the entire point of logging guests in. That power comes with three duties this guide treats plainly: say what you record, keep it only as long as you need it, and guard the record itself. Nothing here is legal advice — laws differ by country, and India's own IT and privacy rules treat connection records as real personal data — but the duties below are the shape of every serious regime.
The terms a guest accepts are your consent record, so write them like one. In plain words, on the page itself: this network is run by you; connections are logged with the account or device and the times; the log is kept for a stated period; it is used for running and securing the network and shared only when the law requires. Two honest sentences beat two pages of copied legal text nobody reads — and a guest who was told is a guest who cannot later claim ambush.
If you collect anything extra — an email for a receipt is common — say why, and never make marketing consent the price of internet access. Bundled consent is weak consent everywhere it is tested.
Logs kept forever are not thoroughness; they are an accumulating liability — a bigger prize for anyone who breaches the firewall and a bigger duty every year. Pick a period that matches a real need: long enough to answer an abuse complaint or a police enquiry about a recent incident, short enough to stay defensible. Weeks to a few months is where most small operators land; hotels and offices with formal policies should write the number into the policy and set the platform's report retention to match.
The deletion half matters as much as the keeping half. A retention promise with no deletion behind it is fiction, and fiction is the worst thing to hand an investigator or a court.
Cafes and small shops: acknowledgement login, minimal fields, short retention. Your realistic duty is a fair-use notice and a recent window of records — do not collect names you do not need.
Hotels: identity is usually tied to a room or a booking, which raises the standard: accounts per room, passwords changed at checkout, retention matched to the stay plus a sensible margin, and staff trained that the log is guest data, not lobby gossip.
Offices with visitors: the strictest of the three, because the same firewall guards real company systems. Written policy, named admins, visitor accounts that expire, and the guest network isolated as the earlier guides insist.
The pattern to notice: the more identity you collect, the more duty you accept. Collect exactly what your purpose needs — that sentence is the legal line, in every country that has one.
What a session looks like in the console and where the records live — covered in the full setup video.
▶️ Watch Full VideoIt can answer what it recorded: which account or device held a session at that time, and the activity the reports retained — provided your retention window still covers that date. This is the legitimate reason portals exist. Hand such requests to your one named responsible person, verify the request properly, and give only what was asked.
Long enough to cover the realistic complaint window — most small operators choose a few weeks to a couple of months — and then actually delete them. The number matters less than having one, writing it on the terms page, and matching your platform retention setting to it.
In many jurisdictions, yes, in some form — connection records about an identifiable person are personal data. Practically: know where your records live, be able to find one guest's sessions, and have a named person who handles such requests. Designing that path now is far cheaper than improvising it during a dispute.