

Īnonymizer was featured as one of the "50 Most Incredibly Useful Sites" in the July 2002 issue of Yahoo! Internet Life magazine. Lance Cottrell was quoted saying that Anonymizer keeps no record of activity or users, which protects both the company and its users from FBI subpoenas. The Patriot Act, which was signed in October 2001 in response to the September 11 attacks, brought more attention to anonymization tools. This can be used to anonymously report a crime, avoid spam, avoid Internet censorship, keep the users identity safe and track competitors, among other uses. One of the first web privacy companies founded, Anonymizer creates a VPN link between its servers and its users computer, creating a random IP address, rather than the one actually being used.
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Boyan licensed the software to C2Net for public beta testing before selling it to Infonex. The name was changed to Anonymizer in 1997 when the company acquired a web based privacy proxy of the same name developed by Justin Boyan at Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science. Anonymizer was originally named Infonex Internet. is an Internet privacy company, founded in 1995 by Lance Cottrell, author of the Mixmaster anonymous remailer.
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If the IP truncation method is used, then at no time is the full IP address written to disk as all truncation happens in memory nearly instantaneously after the request has been received.Anonymizer, Inc. (If the IP address is an IPv6 address, the last 80 of the 128 bits are set to zero.) Only after this truncation process is the request written to disk for processing. If the &aip=1 parameter is found in the request URL, then the last octet of the user IP address is set to zero while still in memory. the IP address of the requester).Īs soon as a request arrives, it is held in memory for truncation. the type of browser being used) and the TCP/IP header (i.e. When a request for gtag.js arrives, it includes additional information in the HTTP request header (i.e. The Analytics Collection Network is the set of servers that provide two main services: the serving of gtag.js (the Analytics JavaScript) and the collection of data sent via requests for /collect. The IP masking parameter looks like this: If the masking function has been called prior to the page tracking function, an additional parameter is added to the pixel request. When the Analytics JavaScript runs a function from the function queue that triggers data to be sent to Google Analytics (this function is typically gtag('config', '' in the gtag.js library), it sends the data as URL parameters attached to an HTTP request for. These functions, which are set by the site owner when implementing Analytics, can include functions like specifying the Analytics account number and actually sending page view data to Google Analytics for processing. The function queue is a JavaScript array where the different Analytics configuration and collection functions are pushed. When a JavaScript-enabled web browser loads a page with the Analytics tag, it does two things asynchronously: It loads and processes the Analytics function queue, and it requests the Analytics JavaScript. The process of IP masking in Analytics takes place within two steps in the collection pipeline: the JavaScript Tag and the Collection Network. The IP truncation/masking takes place as soon as data is received by Google Analytics, before any storage or processing takes place. This feature is designed to help site owners comply with their own privacy policies or, in some countries, recommendations from local data protection authorities, which may prevent the storage of full IP address information. In depthĪnalytics provides the anonymize_ip feature ( gtag('config', '', ) in the gtag.js library) to allow website owners to request that all of their users' IP addresses are masked within the product. In Universal Analytics, IP-address masking is opt in, and is implemented as described in the "In depth" section below. Geographic dimensions are later derived from truncated IP addresses. The full IP address is never written to disk in this case. The IP-masking feature in Universal Analytics sets the last octet of IPv4 user IP addresses and the last 80 bits of IPv6 addresses to zeros in memory shortly after being sent to Google Analytics. When a customer of Universal Analytics requests IP-address masking, Analytics truncates the address as soon as technically feasible. In Google Analytics 4, IP masking is not necessary since IP addresses are not logged or stored.
