Geolocalisation with anonymous IP

Support & Bugs
1

Hello,

What is the impact if I anonymize visitor’s IP? Specially for the geolocalisation?

Thanks in advance,

Marc.

2

Geo Location should still work, with anonimized IP, as it will replace the anonmized bytes by “1” and try to geo locate this

3

hi matt,

unfortunately this doesn’t work for me. some facts:

  • my provider owns 112.144.0.0 - 112.159.255.255
  • i am on 112.151.21.x
  • when my address gets anonymised to 112.151.21.0 or 112.151.0.0 it places me in the US
  • when i switch off anonymisation it places me correctly in south korea
  • we use “GeoIP (Apache)” as location provider
  • the lookup preview in the piwik settings also correctly states “According to this provider, your current location is: Korea, Republic of”

any idea what’s going wrong? does the apache module or the maxmind database behind it not like 112.151.21.1?

cheers

4

Matt,

So, does it mean there are no impact at all on the data with anonimized IP?

Thanks.

5

The impact is that it’s not as correct as before. The IP address is anonymized but the last octet is then replaced with 1 to make geolocalisation possible. Its as near as it can get with anonymization ;).

6

@marc: as i said above, unfortunately for us geo locations are completely off when using ip anonymisation. we tested with ips in south korea, germany and belgium. in all 3 cases locations were not reliable. your mileage may vary.

but i suspect something is buggy in either piwik or the location provider database. could anyone comment on this?

7

meinhard can you please send us the 3 IPs you have tested, and which anonimized IP you have tested? you can use: http://geoiptool.com/ for the tests? thanks!