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zooniverse / geordi-client

A JavaScript client for the Geordi analytics capture engine
Apache License 2.0
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Remove IP Logging #14

Open wgranger opened 7 years ago

wgranger commented 7 years ago

Geordi should not be logging client IPs.

https://github.com/zooniverse/geordi-client/blob/master/src/index.js#L178

alexbfree commented 7 years ago

Why not? Is this because of a privacy concern?

Since Geordi's design intent is to be able to monitor site usage at the individual level (unlike Google Analytics which does it in aggregate), it's pretty important that it does have some kind of unique identifier to distinguish the log records from different users - especially anonymous ones. Also, less critically, it's needed to distinguish different sessions by the same user on different devices - which might have a different IP.

If there is a need to remove IP addresses from Geordi, I think the right way to go would be start using a hashed IP - which I believe is what Panoptes does. From a database point of view Geordi could support this easily because the IP field is just a string. You wouldn't need to change any schema, just application code.

Just thought I would throw my 2c in as I saw this pop up on github.