Piwik 0.5.5 out. New plugin: AnonymizeIP

I run piwik, the Open Source web analytics tool on the webschuur server to track some clients’ sites and this site.

Piwik released a new, mostly bugfix, version. But one particular new feature, the addon “AnonymizeIP” struck me as very usefull:

Anonymize visitor IP addresses to comply with your local privacy laws/guidelines.

Very little more to be found about this, unfortunately, so I dove into the code. The file global.ini.php contains a setting

; number of octets in IP address to mask, in order to anonymize a visitor's IP address; if the 
AnonymizeIP plugin is deactivated, this value is ignored; for IPv4 addresses, valid values are 
0..4"

Setting this to e.g. 3 will mask the addresses, so that you store only the first IP-block is kept. For example, the IP adress from Google (one of the many) 74.125.77.147 will be stored as 74.000.000.000 when set to 3.

I have set this to 2. So I can still guess the approximate region, but can never find out who you are exactly. Great for privacy, yet still somewhat usefull for me.