We have done many background changes inside of the hitsniffer system and we are glad to announce that hitsniffer is compatible with IP anonymity law and UK cookie law now. These changes affect our users in the European Union, this applies to all EU countries.

According to the laws of certain countries, you are not allowed to log the full IP address of your visitors, so we have added an option in the account setting page for your tracking to be complaint with certain new EU Legislation. By enabling this option, tracker will log your site visitors IP addresses anonymously, which takes the last octet and changes it to 0. For example, 127.128.129.120 becomes 127.128.129.0. The system is not just hiding the ip address from you, we remove that number from the tail of the IP address to anonymize it. This complies with laws in places like Germany where it is technically illegal to log the full IP address of a visitor.

If your website has visitors fro EU countries then you must comply with the new legislation or your site could be potentially blocked or you could even be prosecuted for breaching this law.

EU ( UK ) Cookie Law requires that website owners who operate in the EU notify their visitors about cookies that they store about them, you may have seen a notification message in hitsniffer alerting you to this change in law and about our use of cookies. We have updated our Privacy Policy page to list all cookies we store on our website and within our tracking code section, so if you are using our tracking script and want to comply with Cookie Law, you can get a list of cookies that we use at this tracking script page here.

If you are unsure if these new EU laws apply to you then just do a quick search on Google and you will find how important this law change is for webmasters.

Submitted on Sunday, September 2nd, 2012 at 12:15 am