Logging 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 logging option may result in legal problems depending on your contries privacy laws andthe type of service you are running.

The settings for logging user data can be found in:

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

Logging of user data can be controlled on two levels. First, logging can be generally activated or deactivated. Second, if it is activated, the data being logged 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 logging. This may effect features like the footprints in the Opencast player. Default: true.

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

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

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