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Comment by tekism | Hacker News Reader

This is a bit confusing, I have a website and I log IP addresses in my web server log and I use google analytics, what do I need to do?

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The legal ramifications of storing IP addresses didn’t change with GDPR. You should already have them anonymized since they count as personal data:

Google Analytics (https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...):

  ga('set', 'anonymizeIp', true);

Web server (here nginx, https://stackoverflow.com/a/45405406):

  map $remote_addr $remote_addr_anon {
    ~(?P<ip>\d+\.\d+\.\d+)\.    $ip.0;
    ~(?P<ip>[^:]+:[^:]+):       $ip::;
    default                     0.0.0.0;
  }

Only if you store more data about your customers/users you need to act further.

> ga('set', 'anonymizeIp', true);

Note that this doesn't actually provide any useful anonymization. That feature is a placebo designed to give minimal compliance with privacy policies and pre-GDPR data protection requirements.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13639921

Are IP addresses actually considered "personal data"? They are how computers talk to each other. Anonymizing them doesn't make any sense to me.

They're anonymized for things like logs. When the computers aren't talking to each other, the reasons to know the exact IP address are rather minimized. If you feel you have a real need to do so, then you just need to inform your users what you're doing.

You can also irreversibly hash sensitive data it so you can still use it for debugging.

IPV4 is only 4 bytes. Hashing through all 4 milliard is trivial.

Another reason for IPv6.

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