Comment by amichal
7 years ago
Also:
> When a customer of Analytics requests IP address anonymization, Analytics anonymizes the address as soon as technically feasible at the earliest possible stage of the collection network. 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 the Analytics Collection Network. The full IP address is never written to disk in this case.
Why do we trust this statement? It's coming from a company that plays loose with the law and has had some of the biggest fines ever thrown at it. Sorry, but with no way to validate this claim, it is meaningless.
I'm just quoting them.
I'm well aware that all we have is "certification" and "audit" programs to verify their claims. I am also that these are less then perfect and they have been found out to misleading/"lying" before and appeared to prefer large fines rather then fix the the issue. It is 100% likely that their public statements don't match reality perfectly.
I posted the quote because there seemed to be a lack of understanding that this feature even exists in GA. The author of the Show HN post didn't even have a statement on how IP address logging (and various other PI in the GDPR sense) was handled when it was originally posted.
BTW, I think it's great that someone is starting fresh with privacy in mind but even with them we will still no way of trusting what they do with the packets sent their way...