How Piskes Analytics Tracks Visitors Without Storing Raw IP Addresses
Analytics hashes every visitor's IP address before it's stored and strips sensitive properties from custom events, rather than keeping raw identifying data.
Every event Analytics records goes through the same rule before it's written to storage: if there's an IP address attached, it gets hashed first. The raw address is never the thing that ends up stored.
How the hashing works
When an event comes in, its IP is run through a one-way hash function and only the resulting short hash is kept — the original address isn't retained anywhere alongside it. This is worth being precise about: it's a fixed hash derived from the IP itself, not a daily-rotating salted hash the way some privacy-focused analytics tools (Plausible is a commonly cited example) implement it. The practical effect is similar — no raw IP sits in the data — but the specific technique differs, and the two approaches shouldn't be assumed to have identical privacy properties.
It's not just IPs
Custom event properties go through their own filtering step before storage: any property key that matches a known sensitive-key pattern gets dropped entirely, and any string value over 2,000 characters gets truncated. This runs on every event, not just ones you flag — it's a default, not an opt-in.
Why this design choice matters
In the broader analytics-tooling landscape, IP anonymization is treated as close to a dividing line: tools built around it (Plausible, Swetrix, Matomo in its privacy-focused configuration) get positioned as the GDPR-friendly alternative to tools that log raw IPs by default. Piskes Analytics sits on the same side of that line — it doesn't hold onto the data point that would let you (or anyone with access to the raw table) re-identify a visitor by IP after the fact.
What this doesn't tell you
Hashing the IP address doesn't mean visitors are anonymous in every sense — session identifiers, event properties, and page URLs are still recorded as-is, aside from the sensitive-key filtering described above. If you need a fuller picture of what's collected and retained, that's a separate question from IP handling specifically, and worth checking directly rather than assuming IP hashing implies broader anonymity than it actually provides.