Google Analytics does not reveal IP ...

Recently while playing with wonderful Google Analytics service I've been greatly dissapointed to know that there was no way to obtain statistical information about visitors IP addresses! This sounds like nonsense having in mind an awesome number of different other pieces of information about visitors capable of being analyzed. Really, the prehistory was also quite interesting, just look here: http://www.roirevolution.com/blog/2006/09/view_visitor_ip_address_in_google_analytics.html. The found backdoor to workaround the limitation was closed quite fast :) If you haven't read all the comments there, here is what I wrote:

"It seems to be a strange position of Google. Information about IP addresses hardly breaks any privacy rules as there is no way to access a web site and not to reveal the IP address. So any visitor by default agrees for his / her IP to be collected. If higher level of privacy is need, higher level tools should be used by users. That's how it is done, you all know that.
This Analytics limitation just makes the product less handy as info about IPs is anyway stored in web-server's log files and can be easily accessed and analyzed by site owner."

Another interesting thing is that there are people agreeing with Google in this strange Policy. Internet is a big sandbox with little still fundamental rules. One of the main ones is that privacy is really a hardly achievable thing. Just becuase it's not there by design.