Google Analytics IP anonymization is a joke

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2021-07-08 21:30:03

Google Analytics, the popular data gathering and statistics analysis tool, has a feature called IP Anonymization or IP Masking. The name is kind of a joke to me, because it isn’t nearly as anonymous as it sounds. Let’s take a deeper look at this feature!

When a customer of Analytics requests IP address anonymization, Analytics anonymizes the address as soon as technically feasible. The IP anonymization feature in Analytics sets the last octet of IPv4 user IP addresses and the last 80 bits of IPv6 addresses to zeros in memory shortly after being sent to Google Analytics. The full IP address is never written to disk in this case.

Your internet connection is identifyable by something that is called an “IP address” - or in short: “IP”. Most people have an IP that looks somewhat like this: 101.102.103.104. For some devices and internet providers, this might change over time, but for many it stays the same over the course of years. This means that an IP can be used to help identify a user across the internet.

When you browse the web or use applications, your computer talks with various other machines and they can locate each other through these IP addresses. Google Analytics is one of those entities that you can communicate with.

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