Opt-In for IP/Geolocation Collection

Ideas
1

So, this weekend, I randomly ended up looking at the members table in one of my Ghost instances and found an interesting column named geolocation:

CleanShot 2024-03-11 at 17.30.28@2x
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Now, this is obviously used to display the location of a member in the members overview in the Admin.

I was a bit surprised of the amount of information that’s in here. IP address, (supposed) coordinates, name of the ISP (“organization_name”).

Now, storing IP addresses technically is collection of personal data under GDPR (and many other privacy regulations). So…problematic.

I get why it’s done. I personally don’t like it. Especially since this is not documented anywhere and most people using Ghost won’t even know it’s happening.

My wish: let’s make this an explicit opt-in. Potentially when setting up a newsletter. That way, it’s clear that Ghost is storing IP addresses and as webmasters we can choose whether we want that or not.

2

I’m second to this. Storing full IP addresses and coordinates can be a big security issue as well. And the fact is, we currently only use Country and Region data from this big object. So even before implementing an opt-in strategy, at least it would be easy to save only needed information (country and region).

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