Can you elaborate? I find this incredibly hard to believe.

If it's true, you'd think it would be widely-known and publicized in those countries (whichever ones they are) but I can't find any reference to such a policy existing anywhere.

Germany (and probably other countries n the EU as well) considers IP addresses PII, and you have to have consent to store it. Short-term logs might be justifiable as technical necessity (but the lawyers I've heard talk about it didn't want to put a "safe" time frame on that), but certainly not "keep as long as possible".

That's the reason Google Analytics, Piwik and others have an option to blank out parts of the IP address.

Jail is a bit dramatic though (at least here), unless you do something bad with them fines + maybe damages would be the maximum, and it is quite unlikely you'll actually get hit. But if you are ever in a situation where this would come to light (= already in legal trouble), it could make things a lot more complicated, especially if you process data for other companies.

It falls under personal data about someone. Many (but not all) EU countries consider IP addresses to be personal information, and hence "Store it forever for no real reason" is illegal. You need to have a legitimate, legal, reason to store PI, you need the person's unambiguos freely given consent, etc.

There is currently a court case as to whether dynamic IP addresses from ISPs counts as personal information. But static IP address probably count. And all the other information (user X logged in at time Y and send message to other user Z) would be PI too.

It's commonly known in business. I've heard of it repeatedly, usually in terms of "here's what our retention policy has to look like for European customers."

> That's a sure way to go to jail.

Not in (any of) the United States.

Reminds me of that scene in Snatch where Dennis Farina says "yeah, don't go to London."

Don't make any plans to have a physical EU footprint and you can care less what the EU thinks of your internal policies. EU customers can take it or leave it. Their choice. It's not a warm stance to take, but you've probably got a dozen other balls in the air that you're juggling. EU data compliance probably isn't one your worried about as a small startup.

On the other hand, if you comply with EU data policies, your customers might choose your app over another app that doesn’t

(especially european users, and businesses)

Of course. Such are the decisions and tradeoffs that any young startup needs to make. That's why I said that they could take it or leave it.

Too late to edit, but the actual quote was, "Yeah, don't go to England."

And that's why Safe Harbour was found illegal, and why it's probably illegal for EU companies to use those US services.

It could still be good practice to minimize all data when it doesn't serve a purpose, and I can't think of a reason not to delete the last byte of an IP address (except possibly in an internal setting where all clients are from the same subnet).

Personally, I don't see much of a problem when my IP is stored somewhere since you'd need a reference, but others have apparently thought more about it and want it to be anonymized.

(I've now come up with scenario: If you have access to multiple such sets of data, you could connect accounts from different systems. I. e. when the youporn logs leak, someone could tie the data to your HN account etc.)

> (I've now come up with scenario: If you have access to multiple such sets of data, you could connect accounts from different systems. I. e. when the youporn logs leak, someone could tie the data to your HN account etc.)

Combine that with leaks of a social network where you have real names and IP addresses, and you could actually identify the name, job, address, etc of everyone who watched a specific clip of porn.

That’s very bad.

Metadata. Not even once.