Data privacy: IP adress and location in core table

[Christina Brunner]

Hi everyone,

for my experiment I don't need participants' IP-Address and I especially don't want to track my participants' locations due to data privacy concerns.

1. Did I understand correctly that the IP address is saved hashed only and therefore I'm not collecting sensitive data here? And, even if it is hashed - is there a way to fully prevent processing and saving of the IP address?
   
   
2. More importantly: How can I prevent my program from saving participants' locations? Is there a way to disable the feature?
   I found out that I can replace the location by nonsense with:
   setValue('core', 'playerNr='+playerNr+' and period='+period, 'location', -99);
   But this solution feels slightly dubious since initially the experiment still processes participants' location - is there a better way to do this?

Thanks for your help!

[in...@lioness-lab.org]

Hi Christina,

 

When you have downloaded your experiment, you can switch this off by finding the file “register.php” in the folder resources…basis…participant. You can there replace lines 24-30 by $ipaddress .= rand(10000000, 99999999);

 

Note though, that you might get some participants who enter your experiments more than once. I copy in Marcus to see if he knows a more elegant solution that allows for blocking re-takers without processing IP addresses (maybe based on cookies?). In the meanwhile, the above solution should work, but please do test it before you run your experiment. : )

 

Cheers,

Lucas

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[in...@lioness-lab.org]

… that replacement line should read

 

$ipaddress = rand(10000000, 99999999);

 

So, no dot before the equal sign.

 

Lucas

 

From: in...@lioness-lab.org <in...@lioness-lab.org>
Sent: maandag 19 mei 2025 08:50
To: 'Christina Brunner' <christi...@gmail.com>; 'LIONESS Lab help and discussion' <lione...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: RE: Data privacy: IP adress and location in core table

 

Hi Christina,

 

When you have downloaded your experiment, you can switch this off by finding the file “register.php” in the folder resources…basis…participant. You can there replace lines 24-30 by $ipaddress .= rand(10000000, 99999999);

 

Note though, that you might get some participants who enter your experiments more than once. I copy in Marcus to see if he knows a more elegant solution that allows for blocking re-takers without processing IP addresses (maybe based on cookies?). In the meanwhile, the above solution should work, but please do test it before you run your experiment. : )

 

Cheers,

Lucas

 

 

 

From: lione...@googlegroups.com <lione...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Christina Brunner
Sent: zondag 18 mei 2025 17:11
To: LIONESS Lab help and discussion <lione...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Data privacy: IP adress and location in core table

 

Hi everyone,

 

--

[Marcus Giamattei - LIONESS Development team]

Dear Christina,

yes, it is stored only in a one-way hashed value so it can not be decoded again to the original value. You are only storing an encrypted version of the IP address.

And location is also not a personal data according to my understanding.

If you want to get rid of this, you can delete line 87 in register.php with retrieves the geolocation with the help of geoplugin. (once you downloaded your own version)

Best, Marcus

[Christina Brunner]

Dear Marcus, dear Lucas,

I'm still in the pilot / debugging phase, but I'll test your solutions once the experiment is ready to go (and let you know how it went if you're curious haha). Sounds great so far, thanks for your replies!

And by the way, huge THANK YOU for making LIONESS!! You're enabling me to build my experiment with so little effort, and the result is prettier and works smoother than it would if I had to code it all entirely from scratch. You've made my work so much better, I'm really grateful.

Best,

Christina