[viraptor]

> Such logging isn't technically necessary to serve web pages, and ideally shouldn't be done without consent.

It's needed as soon as you want to do: non-trivial spam protection, context connection for errors/exceptions, dos mitigation, correlation of issues across browsers, and a few other things.

For most of those you could theoretically hash the IP because you're interested in matches not actual values (although matching either the AS or at least /24 makes things easier). But until we migrate to IPv6 hashing doesn't make sense (and once we move, keeping individual addresses doesn't make sense).

Basically the bigger the site, the more important that information is for operations.

[Retric]

You can do all of those things without logging that information. It’s a cheaper solution to the problem, but that does not mean it’s required.

Which devolves your argument into collecting this information is significantly more profitable. Which I think is generally accepted as true, but not nessisarily enough to make it acceptable.

[viraptor]

How would you match traffic from the same source without keeping the record of that source?

[Retric]

That’s a technique not a goal. What are you trying to do?

[viraptor]

Find when a specific endpoint / AS / country starts sending dos levels of traffic, (or hack attempts) so they can be banned.

[Retric]

Rate limiting prevents a specific IP from causing a successful DoS. You can log higher level information like county without linking it to a specific user.

In terms of hacking, building a secure site prevents this problem at the source. Banning specific IP’s in a world of proxies and public WiFi is almost useless.

[viraptor]

You don't ban them forever. Banning specific ranges which impact you right now is very effective too. Also "building a secure site" at some scale is impossible. At some point you try to figure out where the risk is, how to mitigate it, and what happens after a break-in. You can't prevent it. Logging helps track specific behaviour and catch those situations. That's similar to fraud prevention as well. The fact that someone who just logged in from Germany tries to spend credit in a request from Brazil is important and prevents real crime. That kind of information needs to be connected to an account.