Remove IP-based location determination?

[slager]

I'm wondering if we should just remove the IP-based location determination. It's neat, but it creates potential privacy issues by exposing IP address and coordinates in the VCR fixtures. Also my experimenting with it shows that the location can be quite far off from my actual location.

[sebpardo]

Is there a way to hide IP addresses and coordinates in VCR the same way we hide the API key?

[jrdnbradford]

It looks like you can filter data via regex in {vcr}, so something like this would remove coordinates from URLs and JSON strings in the fixtures:

library("vcr") # *Required* as vcr is set up on loading
invisible(vcr::vcr_configure(
  filter_sensitive_data = list("<<<redacted>>>" = Sys.getenv('EBIRD_KEY')),
+ filter_sensitive_data_regex = list(
+   '"lat":<<<redacted>>>' = '("lat"|"latitude"):(-?\\d+(\\.\\d+)?)',
+   "lat=<<<redacted>>>" = '(lat|latitude)=(-?\\d+(\\.\\d+)?)',
+   '"lng":<<<redacted>>>' = '("lng"|:"longitude"):(-?\\d+(\\.\\d+)?)',
+   "lng=<<<redacted>>>" = '(lng|longitude)=(-?\\d+(\\.\\d+)?)'
+ ),
  dir = vcr::vcr_test_path("fixtures")
))

If redaction is the route you want to go I'm happy to take a look.

[slager]

I tried at one point using vcr/regex to redact latitude, longitude, and IP address, but iirc the tricky part is that they occur inside a long string value. If you can get it to work, go for it.

[jrdnbradford]

I tried a few things but every solution I tried that redacted the relevant data ended up causing issues with the vcr testing setup. 🫠