We recently blogged on Google Analytics and data privacy, with the intention of correcting some of the public misconceptions about Google and the way it handles analytics data. One of the issues that prompted this debate was the fact that it was possible (with some clever filtering) to show your visitors IP address in the GA reports.

However we have been testing this feature and it is apparent that Google have recently disabled it. Previously, by stripping out the visitor IP address and adding it to the User Defined variable, the IP address would show up in reports. However, now this report (Marketing Optimisation -> Visitor Segment Performance -> User-defined) now shows a value of ‘(not set)’ for all visitors, as it would if the User Defined variable had never been used.

This is another indication of how seriously Google takes data privacy. It is no longer possible to identify individual users by their IP address in Google Analytics. Not only was this disallowed in the Terms of Service, but in the most recent update to the GA backend, Google have been proactive in disabling this feature which had the potential to identify individual users.