4 ms·
I believe it is a common practice to remove the last part of the IP to make it sufficiently anonymous. Disclaimer: I used to work for Microsoft, and this is wh
by notimetorelax 8y ago
I believe it is a common practice to remove the last part of the IP to make it sufficiently anonymous.
Disclaimer: I used to work for Microsoft, and this is what we did.
- pdkl95 8y agoZeroing out the lest-interesting octet of an IPv4 address is only a placebo that doesn't provide any useful anonymity. The other data being collected at the same time almost certainly has enough identifying entropy to correlate a partial IPv4 address with other personally identifying records, probably trivially. For a longer explanation, see my post about the &aip=1 feature in Google Analytics that does the same thing to the end of the IP. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17170468 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17170468
- notimetorelax 8y agoThis is fair, I can only say that we (in my team at least) have gone great lengths to anonymize data as much as possible. No internal user IDs, no user entered text, it got to a point that we were becoming ineffective in diagnostics of outages...