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I took some interest in the concept of hashing IPs to avoid PII issues [0], and it turns out that since there's only so few IPv4 addresses, it's trivial to simp
by Etheryte 3y ago
I took some interest in the concept of hashing IPs to avoid PII issues [0], and it turns out that since there's only so few IPv4 addresses, it's trivial to simply take the salt the project uses and calculate all the hashes. On my laptop it would take around two hours with the most naive implementation, so I don't really think this solves anything. This problem would be sidestepped by IPv6, but we all know how that is going so far.
[0] https://github.com/storybookjs/storybook/discussions/19910#discussioncomment-7069903 https://github.com/storybookjs/storybook/discussions/19910#d...
- buildfocus 3y agoThe classic better approach would be to drop part of the IP address entirely, so it's impossible to recreate the full value. For example, dropping the last octet (turning 123.4.5.6 into 123.4.5.0) means you can usually still do useful IP things (where in the world do our users come from, very roughly) while making it impossible to track unique users, or to definitively recognize real individuals. I've seen one octet masking used as standard, probably just because it's easy, but you could do any other similar change you like, optimising for more or less anonymity/granularity as required.