User Statistics and Privacy

The Opencast User-Tracking service stores user actions of the Opencast players in the database. This data is used for the footprint feature of the player and for the optional analytics component.

Note that enabling all of the tracking options may result in legal problems depending on your country's privacy laws and the type of service you are running.

The settings for tracking user data can be found in:

.../etc/org.opencastproject.usertracking.impl.UserTrackingServiceImpl.cfg

Tracking of user data can be controlled on two levels. First, tracking can be generally activated or deactivated. Second, if it is activated, the data being tracked can be defined.

org.opencastproject.usertracking.detailedtrack defines if the user tracking JavaScript code is loaded and data about user actions are being sent to and stored by Opencast. Deactivating this will effectively stop all tracking. This may effect features like the footprints in the Opencast player. Default: true.

If tracking is still activated, the following keys may be used to define the kind of data that is being tracked. The keys have no effect if tracking is turned off.

Key Data to be tracked Default value
org.opencastproject.usertracking.log.ip IP addresses false
org.opencastproject.usertracking.log.user login names of users false
org.opencastproject.usertracking.log.session Browser session-IDs false

If you want to use the footprint feature but do not want to store any user specific data you can turn the tracking of IP addresses, usernames and session-IDs off.