Is it wrong to collect and store IP addresses?

Question

I am developing a PHP analytics program. I am using IP addresses to get its corresponding country. I was wondering if its OK to store both the IP address and Country or if its better if I just store the country in a MySQL database?

Answer 1

There should be no problems with this from a legal/personal information perspective, as if you are using IP ranges in aggregate to understand stats per country you are not storing information about an individual.

Your problem may be that you rely on the IP data to give you results - remember the IP address you see a connection coming from may have nothing to do with the individual connecting. They may be routed through intermediaries, or their ISP may be routing connections strangely, or their company may route internally to a point of presence in another company etc.

Answer 2

Why not just do this by prefix and ASN?

Answer 3

There is nothing wrong with storing the IP address of a visitor. There are any number of valid reasons to store IP addresses of visitors to your website (security, analytics, etc).

Answer 4

In analytics there is ip address and user agent most often. And if you break everything into this unique combination, you will have plenty of data to group by, therefore this is best recommended to keep e.g. in separate table and extract from it only number of unique viewers and once a time (e.g. per month) delete them all.

I have e.g. hundreds of millions of such combinations, and just to keep it for e.g. a year it doesn't make sense.

I rather generate random key for each user and track him based on that, and not his ip number is completely unnecessary except for the security reasons but this is all mostly in the archive.

It is mainly because users will generate unlimited number of such combinations so best is just to not keep this data in online database, period :-)

Obviously derived data like location, ASN etc is a different story, this data is not unique to every user, so it's much lower amount of data to process.

Answer 5

It all depends on what the information you need to refer in future. Obviously, there's nothing wrong to store both the IP and country information, as the IP block changes from time to time, and the IP-to-Country correlation may not be the same in future.