Increasing privacy in Moodle

Here are some suggestions for site administrators to increase privacy in Moodle:

Site policy settings

In Settings > Site 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

If Self enrolment is used, in Settings > Site administration > Plugins > Enrolments > Self enrolment:

• Enforce enrolment key usage by ticking the 'Require enrolment key' checkbox
• Enforce enrolment key complexity by ticking the 'Use password policy' checkbox
• Disable the enrolment key hint leaving the 'Show hint' checkbox unticked

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 > Site 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, first access, last access, last IP address and my courses.

See also

• Using Moodle Security and Privacy forum
• Using Moodle Student Privacy forum discussion