Deduplication in Engage is an option that Zencity clients can enable on various results and reporting screens to reduce the impact of participants’ attempts to ‘stuff the ballot box’ by submitting the same responses to an engagement multiple times. It should be noted that even without using these administrative deduplication tools, the resident-facing engagement experience acts as the first line of defense by actively discouraging this behavior unless kiosk mode has been enabled.
Duplicates are identified by analyzing participant information over the entire set of an engagement’s submissions The two pieces of information that are currently evaluated are the participant’s IP address and their digital fingerprint. It should be noted that some clients choose to disable digital fingerprint collection entirely and others allow participants to opt-out of digital fingerprint collection, both of which can reduce the effectiveness of the deduplication functionality.
An important note on privacy: the digital fingerprint and IP address are not stored in an identifiable fashion, but rather as an irreversible hash of letters and numbers that maintains comparability without storing anything personally identifiable. So an IP address like 10.15.190.123 might be stored as 5dtry38u8j9cru0we98rux118934ukr and a digital fingerprint comprised of many different properties of the participant’s computer hardware and software might be stored as 3tr123jiojf132jf23.
Deduplication is executed as a ‘first-pass’ before any other filters are applied, reducing the list of overall submissions that the results or reporting system uses to only include the first submission from a composite key containing device (digital fingerprint) and internet connection (IP address). This means that occasionally if the first submission from a specific device does not contain a response to a specific question, even if the subsequent submissions do, the result set will not contain a response to that question from that particular device.
Here is an example of submissions (in the order they were received) for an engagement run in Zencity Engage (you export this information as a CSV file for any engagement you run). Note that if you have deduplication applied, only the bold submission rows (and the responses that are part of those submissions) will be included when looking using results visualization, clustering, analysis or reporting capabilities. Submissions for the first instance of each unique combination of Hashed IP & Digital Fingerprint will be included, subsequent submissions for the same Hashed IP & Digital Fingerprint will not.
Submission | Date | Hashed IP | Digital Fingerprint | Include |
22 | 2023-09-06 17:09:06 | d0568d562eb279ed0ea1f0dd48d0c | dd8702fb7b45ad886ee1cf1086de2693 | Yes |
23 | 2023-09-06 17:12:16 | 82a0406aa2d969c61c62d030bcaf | 7c94b01eca72cbda391ef255163c0a89 | Yes |
24 | 2023-09-06 17:13:07 | d0568d562eb279ed0ea1f0dd48d0c | dd8702fb7b45ad886ee1cf1086de2693 | No |
25 | 2023-09-06 17:13:22 | 82a0406aa2d969c61c62d030bcaf | 7c94b01eca72cbda391ef255163c0a89 | No |
28 | 2023-09-06 22:41:01 | a1ea0aeb88814dff62d642be | f13f5127ae1cfb7b2e8cf3d8daa08eab | Yes |
29 | 2023-09-07 21:10:50 | d0568d562eb279ed0ea1f0dd48d0c | dd8702fb7b45ad886ee1cf1086de2693 | No |
31 | 2023-09-07 21:18:35 | d0568d562eb279ed0ea1f0dd48d0c | c028014397218331ea26c868397985ba | Yes |
41 | 2023-09-27 18:58:20 | d0568d562eb279ed0ea1f0dd48d0c | f13f5127ae1cfb7b2e8cf3d8daa08eab | Yes |
49 | 2023-10-27 22:24:56 | d0568d562eb279ed0ea1f0dd48d0c | dd8702fb7b45ad886ee1cf1086de2693 | No |
102 | 2023-11-01 20:42:59 | 706c9f4b8d70a50df7b079860eaaf | 95ac31c515f5b6e6455b4ad273fce8fb | Yes |
103 | 2023-11-09 0:06:08 | 942505fa67acbf6ed5b22dd2e5 | 0beece094a5a6289bc70714f2b1c89d1 | Yes |
104 | 2023-11-09 0:08:06 | 942505fa67acbf6ed5b22dd2e5 | 0beece094a5a6289bc70714f2b1c89d1 | No |
105 | 2023-11-20 23:56:39 | d0568d562eb279ed0ea1f0dd48d0c | 04e48ad7ddabfeb645eb6a6b8cc93ae7 | Yes |
106 | 2023-11-20 23:57:58 | d0568d562eb279ed0ea1f0dd48d0c | 04e48ad7ddabfeb645eb6a6b8cc93ae7 | No |
107 | 2023-11-20 23:58:46 | d0568d562eb279ed0ea1f0dd48d0c | 04e48ad7ddabfeb645eb6a6b8cc93ae7 | No |
108 | 2023-11-21 0:04:06 | d0568d562eb279ed0ea1f0dd48d0c | 5ff8b4f17cd5f62d2a4ffb4159a18fd8 | Yes |
109 | 2023-11-21 6:02:15 | 942505fa67acbf6ed5b22dd2e5 | 0ec56ef326a629c2e9ae162f8f83c278 | Yes |
110 | 2023-11-21 15:27:12 | 82a0406aa2d969c61c62d030bcaf | 9d1c9107a47fcb6258c7ddb822770488 | Yes |
111 | 2023-11-21 22:31:28 | 82a0406aa2d969c61c62d030bcaf | Yes | |
112 | 2023-11-21 22:58:03 | 22d05cb7ffb31f44c70e12d7d6e7 | Yes | |
113 | 2023-11-21 22:58:51 | 22d05cb7ffb31f44c70e12d7d6e7 | No | |
114 | 2023-11-21 23:00:35 | fb7bda8db7174ca9cc04a62142 | Yes | |
115 | 2023-11-21 23:03:03 | fb7bda8db7174ca9cc04a62142 | No |
Note: Clients who have used Zencity Engage for many years may have used results filtering tools where IP address and digital fingerprint deduplication were available for use separately. This approach is less effective at deduplication and has been removed from the results and analysis tools.
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