While the entire German blogosphere seems to have discovered the pretty unpleasant, secretive inclusion of Quantcast tracking in the “WordPress.com Stats” plugin, I found an article on the blog that broke the story in Germany, that explains how you can somewhat limit (valid) privacy-concerns with Google Analytics.

You just have to push “_gat._anonymizeIp” as an option in the _gaq object, as shown on line 5 in this code snippet:

<script type="text/javascript">
  var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-xxxxxxx-x']);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
  _gaq.push(['_gat._anonymizeIp']);

  (function() {
    var ga = document.createElement('script');
    ga.type = 'text/javascript';
    ga.async = true;
    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0];
    s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
  })();
</script>

According to the relevant Google Analytics docs page, this:

“Tells Google Analytics to anonymize the information sent by the tracker objects by removing the last octet of the IP address prior to its storage. Note that this will slightly reduce the accuracy of geographic reporting.”

Call me naive (or overly idealistic), but shouldn’t your Google Analytics implementation have this option on as well?