Privacy with Google Analytics

摘要

Google Analytics has a lot of configuration options, which is why webmasters love it. For the purposes of user privacy, however, there are just two configuration options to pay attention to, the "IP Anonymization" option and the "Display Features" option. IP Anonymization says to Google Analytics, "please don't remember the exact IP address of my users." According to Google, enabling this mode masks the least significant bits of the user's IP address before the IP address is used or saved. Since many users can be identified by their IP address, this prevents anyone from discovering the search history for a given IP address. But remember, Google is still sent the IP address, and we have to trust that Google will obscure the IP address as advertised and not save it in some log somewhere. Even with the masked IP address, it may still be possible to identify a user, particularly if a library serves a small number of geographically dispersed users.