No, it is not ridiculous. Yes, an IP alone is probably worthless. But take an IP together with even a seemingly insignificant piece of information, and you have

No, it is not ridiculous. Yes, an IP alone is probably worthless. But take an IP together with even a seemingly insignificant piece of information, and you have the potential to know a lot more. I think that's why the EU regulators decided to consider IPs as personal data. Example: you run a website and in your log file you only collect IP addresses, apparently anonymous. Log lines come with a timestamp. You now know that a user at IP X visited your website at time Y. Sounds like this should be personal information in my opinion, and that log file should be protected.