Privacy
IP address
Also called client IP.
IP address is the network address attached to a request. In the EU it is generally treated as personal data, because the connection can be linked to a subscriber.
How it is measured
Every request carries one, and servers, CDNs, load balancers, and analytics collectors can all log it. IPv4 uses four numbers, IPv6 uses a longer hexadecimal form. Find where it lands by reading an access log line and a tool export.
The count to watch is storage: how many rows contain a full address, and for how many days. A year of logs is a year of personal data.
Worked example
A pottery shop's access log has 480,000 lines a week, each with the visitor's IP. With a 30-day retention that is about 2 million lines at any moment.
Cutting retention to 7 days drops the stored set to roughly 480,000 lines. Fraud checks still work, since the shop only looks back a few days.
How it differs
An IP address is the full network identifier. IP anonymization is the step that shortens or hashes it before storage. The address names a connection; anonymization removes the part that points to one host.
Common errors
Calling it anonymous because it is not a name. Keeping raw logs for years. Forgetting CDN and proxy logs. Treating a shared office address as one person. Passing it to third parties by default.
In practice
Find every system that stores full addresses and set its retention. Truncate at the edge where you can. Decide which tools need the value and cut it from the rest.