In a regular Decidim installation, all user accounts registered on the platform are public by default and a public profile is created for every user on the platform automatically. This principle comes from the social aspect of the platform which encourages people to act using their own names rather than keeping all discussion anonymous. The public profiles only include information that is supposed to be public, not any private information such as the user's email address or their identity details.
This is also a very good principle in general for any platform dealing with democracy, as acting with real names improves the quality of discussion and keeps the unwanted effects of completely anonymous interactions away from platforms where people are supposed to work together as a community towards goals that affect their own good as a collective entity.
However, there are also many participative actions that people can perform completely anonymously, such as answering a survey, participating in a voting process, supporting proposals, etc. Currently the regular Decidim platform requires the users to have a public profile even when they are performing such anonymous actions.
This module improves the privacy of the users on any Decidim platform. It provides certain controls under the profile settings that allow individual users to decide whether they want to appear publicly on the platform or not. It also makes everyone's profile private by default which means that no information is published about users before they have given their explicit consent to publish this information. Certain public actions on the platform, such as leaving a comment, submitting a proposal, sending private messages, etc. will still require the users to publish their profiles in order to maintain the benefits related non-anonymous participation, the way Decidim was originally designed.
When the users decide the remain anonymous or "private", all their information is hidden from the platform, including the Decidim API and any page which would normally show their information, such as the profile page.
After installing this module, "Privacy settings" section will be added to the participant account settings as shown in the below image. Users will be able to make their profile public or private. By default, accounts are private.
If a private user wants to participate in an activity which requires a public profile (such as leaving a comment, submitting a proposal, etc.), the user is asked to give a consent for publishing their information with a popup notification, as shown in below image.
When the profile is not public, the sections in the profile menu that require a public profile are not shown:
If the profile is public, the profile menu works exactly as it would work in Decidim by default.
Add this line to your application's Gemfile:
gem "decidim-privacy"And then execute:
bundle
bundle exec rails decidim_privacy:install:migrations
bundle exec rails db:migrateThis module includes changes made to the default scope of the Decidim::User
and Decidim::UserGroup models, which also affects the console environment.
For example the User model has been scoped to only find public users by default
(users that have a value in the attribute published_at). To list users that
are private (i.e. published_at: nil) and public, use the entire_collection
method to fetch all these records, e.g.:
> Decidim::User.entire_collection.all
See Decidim.
If you would like to see this module in your own language, you can help with its translation at Crowdin:
https://crowdin.com/project/decidim-privacy
This engine is distributed under the GNU AFFERO GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE.