Problems with Segments and anonymized IP-Addresses

Hey there,

I’ve got a question about anonymizing ip-addresses.
I searched in the forums and even via google I could not find the issue, at least not as “solved”.
Here in germany we have to anonymize the ip-addresses, you might know that.
I know there’s a setting in PIWIK’s privacy configuration.

The problem is, I’ve also set up some segments to keep the companies subsidiaries separate from
the rest of the world. They are identified via their ip-addresses.

As I understand the privacy settings, those should be tracked before anonymizing their ip-addresses,
but after several weeks, I still see no visitors if I select the specific segments. It seems
PIWIK is not able to determine them. Is it possible anonymization and segments with ip_address
don’t work together?

Maybe someone can give me a hint to the solution or can tell me if it just won’t work.

Here are my privacy settings:

Anonymize Visitors’ IP addresses: Yes
Select how many bytes of the visitors’ IPs should be masked: 2 byte(s)
Also use the Anonymized IP addresses when enriching visits. No

Thanks in advance!

Sincerly, Chrissli

Did I understand correctly that you want to track certain IP addresses while anonymizing visitor IPs?

If so – by my logic, tracking IP addresses for any purpose would be equal to throwing the privacy aspect out the window, which to me just sounds obvious that it won’t work.

Basically you’re right, but those IP addresses are company addresses, they are not unique per user. But I get your idea, that could be used to negate the logic behind it.
I thought the anonymize stuff is just for not storing IP addresses, but still recognizing them in the generated statistics. since I’ve read something about that users are not identified by IP ( alone ) , as it might change, but with the tracking cookie and some information like plugins and stuff.

Thanks for your suggestion anyways.