Increasing privacy in Moodle

Here are some suggestions for increasing privacy in Moodle:

Site policy settings

In Administration > Security > Site policies:

• Force users to login by checking the forcelogin checkbox
• Keep "Force users to login for profiles" enabled to keep anonymous visitors and search engines away from user profiles

Enrolment key usage

In the Internal enrolment settings via Administration > Courses > Enrolments:

• Enforce enrolment key usage by setting enrol_manual_requirekey to Yes (in Moodle 1.9.4 onwards)
• Disable the enrolment key hint by setting enrol_manual_showhint to No (in Moodle 1.9.3 onwards)
• Enforce enrolment key complexity by setting enrol_manual_usepasswordpolicy to Yes (in Moodle 1.9.4 onwards)

Hiding user fields

Increase student privacy by hiding user fields which would normally appear on users' profile pages, and in some cases on the course participants page.

The hiddenuserfields setting is in Administration > Users > Permissions > User policies.

User fields which may be hidden are:
Description, city/town, country, web page, ICQ number, Skype ID, Yahoo ID, AIM ID, MSN ID, last access and My courses (in Moodle 1.9.4 onwards).

See also

• Using Moodle Security and Privacy forum
• MDL-17205 Privacy improvements project for 1.9.x