Is moodle admin able to see your location based on your IP address? Do they have access to this information?
Sure, unless you take special precautions like going through The Onion Router (Tor) https://www.torproject.org/.
A word of caution though. The very fact that you use Tor makes you suspicious to the NSA people - that is what I heard. See "What has Snowden taught us?" https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=234108 and the continuation "Snowden's world" https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=272464.
A word of caution though. The very fact that you use Tor makes you suspicious to the NSA people - that is what I heard. See "What has Snowden taught us?" https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=234108 and the continuation "Snowden's world" https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=272464.
Just saw, related to the "word of caution" in my prev post:
http://www.dailydot.com/politics/google-autocomplete-nsa-spying-ruined-life/
http://www.dailydot.com/politics/google-autocomplete-nsa-spying-ruined-life/
Directly through Moodle no - but using something like whois lookup can give an indication and Im sure for those who really want it then yes an ip address can give location. Personally I wouldn't know how, but then Ive never had cause to try and find out - its probably not that difficult for someone who really wants to.
Would most Moodle admins know/care/be nefarious enough to want to look it up? At some stage you have to have a level of professional trust in someone and in most cases Id probably prefer to trust the admins of any moodle site I work with than many other websites! If you are on the web, you leave a trail and someone could follow that trail - I would probably say that most education/training establishments (moodle sites) are probably not the biggest cause for concern in this respect though.
On the benefits of storing IP addresses in the log - in the last 3 months I have had to use the ip address stored in the logs to prove that one user was hacking the account of another (careless sharing of passwords among Key Stage 2 Junior children was the actual route of the access, rather than technical security flaws, use of bad language on a forum under another pupil's name was the action being investigated). Able to show that the actions under two different user names took place from exactly the same ip address within seconds - location itself wasn't really relevant, beyond the fact that both users concerned were not in the same place at that time (wherever that was), but without the ip address in the logs that would have been very difficult to prove.
Richard
I thought the by default Moodle is configured to look up the geoPlugin service, which gives you the city. How accurate I don't know. The iplookup page in Moodle says, "geoPlugin service is currently being used to look up geographical information. For more accurate results we recommend installing a local copy of the MaxMind GeoLite database".
So the administrator is _able_ to find the location directly through Moodle. Of course if he takes more trouble he can be more accurate.
The other question, whether they do, or should do, that is an "open ended" question.
;-(
I thought the by default Moodle is configured to look up the geoPlugin service, which gives you the city. How accurate I don't know. The iplookup page in Moodle says, "geoPlugin service is currently being used to look up geographical information. For more accurate results we recommend installing a local copy of the MaxMind GeoLite database".
So the administrator is _able_ to find the location directly through Moodle. Of course if he takes more trouble he can be more accurate.
The other question, whether they do, or should do, that is an "open ended" question.
;-(
Well, here is Bruce Schneier tackling the ethics:
‘Everybody spies, or nobody does’
What do we want: Privacy or surveillance?
BBC Future Nov 2014
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20141103-everybody-spies-or-nobody-does
‘Everybody spies, or nobody does’
What do we want: Privacy or surveillance?
BBC Future Nov 2014
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20141103-everybody-spies-or-nobody-does
If the Moodle site is set up to use a Google Analytics tracking code the organization can track users at least down to the city level. There are also ways to go into more detail and track by user demographics, but that requires some additional setup and tracking cookies.
I think it depends how you define 'location'. In a vague and often inaccurate way, yes. Down to your actual street address, no. A quick check of the address I am currently using puts me in the Woodford Green area of London. I am actually just outside Glasgow. That's a long walk!
As ever, it's not really a Moodle thing. You can Google for finding location from IP address and find plenty to read