Disabling collection of IP addresses on your Citizen Space site

By default, responses in Citizen Space include the IP address(es) used during the submission, this information appears alongside your responses. This is intended to assist you in identifying suspicious responses, such as in the case of automated submissions, duplicate submissions, or where inappropriate content has been submitted.

If you prefer, we can disable this setting for all new activities if you send us a request to do so - just get in touch with your customer success manager via our support email address and we can adjust this site-wide setting.

Please note: We need requests to disable to come in writing from the main site admin. 

The following topics will be covered in this article:

Where would I find IP addresses if they are being collected for my Citizen Space activities?

If IP address collection is on, you will find IP addresses:

  • In one of the final columns of the .xlsx exports to 'download all responses' and 'download all responses including analyst fields'
  • When querying response data, in one of the final columns of the .xlsx exports to 'download of filtered responses' and 'filtered responses including analyst fields'
  • At the bottom of the PDF for each individual response
  • At the bottom of the screen in each individual response when accessed via 'responses organised by respondent'

If IP address collection is off:

  • IP addresses will not be available at all, not in any of your activity's exports, nor on screen in any response

What about existing activities?

If we disable IP address collection it will apply to all new activities you add after you've asked us to turn it on, but not retrospectively. IP addresses will:

  • Still be in the exports (and all the places detailed above) of all activities you have run previously, as they will have collected them with their responses while they were running
  • Still be collected on any activities you have added before collection was disabled, even if you haven't yet published them

Please note: If you regularly clone activities, such as template activities, then cloning any which were created before you asked us to disable the collection of IP addresses on your site will carry forward their original setting to collect IP addresses.

If you need this disabled for a particular activity then get in touch via our support email address with the URL of the activity. A good example might be a template activity that you use regularly, if so - let us know.

Operational collection of IP addresses

Please note that completely separately to this, we (Delib) collect and store logs of all activity on customer sites at server level and this includes IP addresses. This is specifically for the purpose of detecting and responding to security incidents (such as denial-of-service attacks). This data is stored securely in Delib’s logs and it's not possible to disable this collection of IP addresses. Collection of IP addresses for network and information security purposes is covered for EU customers under the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) recital 49, and more detail on that can be found in our GDPR FAQs article.