The identification of city, region and country does not always work accurately in Friendly Analytics. This is the price we pay for more data protection. What exactly is the reason for this? To explain this, we need to get a little technical.

For data protection reasons, we anonymize the IP address of website visitors. This means that the shortened IP address is no longer considered personal data (PII).

This has practically no effect on tracking - except for recognizing the location.

We derive the location of the visitor from the IP address This process is called geo-localization.

When anonymizing the IP, we set the last two digits of the IP address to 0. For example, the full IP 31.10.135.161 becomes the anonymized IP 31.10.0.0.

The full IP is correctly assigned to the canton of Aargau in Switzerland by common geolocation databases - although this is not an exact science either. Various databases locate the visitor either in Baden or Oftringen:

The anonymized IP, on the other hand, is located somewhere between Perm and Moscow in Russia:

In most cases, however, the country and usually also the canton are correct for the anonymized IP, but the location is often imprecise.

Unfortunately, you can't have it both ways - data protection AND the greatest possible accuracy in geolocalization. In this area of conflict, we have opted for data protection.

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