As I understand it, from a legal standpoint, storing it for operational purposes is equivalent to storing it for any other purpose. Also, even if you only stor

As I understand it, from a legal standpoint, storing it for operational purposes is equivalent to storing it for any other purpose. Also, even if you only store the information for 24 hours--how many users are on Hackernews in a given hour? How many of them click through the top links? Certainly enough that some sites have crashed under the load, which makes me think that the number is higher than 50K. Congrats, you're now storing 50K IPs, despite having an automated system to delete them in a day. (I don't even wanna think about the headache it'd cause if you got dragged to court over this. I don't know how many judges will understand that you delete the list every 24 hours to avoid being liable for storing it, not to get rid of evidence.)