From time to time, I get requests from people to look up whether other people have been logging in on their account, and I'd like to enable them to do so without having go through me. I can't seem to find the thread, but a while ago, I asked publicly if people would feel comfortable with a "security log" section under the account profile, and somewhat understandably many were not comfortable with IP addresses being "visible".
I've been mulling over it at low intensity since then, and eventually came up with a way to obfuscate IP addresses in a way that should be less controversial, but still useful for trying to figure out what's been happening. To post a concrete example, and also to demonstrate how I think this information should be insensitive enough to share publicly, here's what the log would look like for my account:
As can be seen, IP addresses themselves are "tokenized", but in the Address Table at the bottom of the page, you can still see country information, and information about shared bytes in the addresses. The reason shared bytes can be important is because it can allow you to see (or at least guess) whether two addresses come from the same ISP, for instance. Specifically, the "shared prefix" images work such that, if the color of a box changes from one row to the next, that means that the corresponding byte in the address is different between those two addresses (the table is sorted such that addresses with shared prefixes are next to one another in it). In the example table, then, that means that addresses 5 and 6 share their first two bytes, which is also true between addresses 0, 2 and 4.
In addition to the actions that can be seen on my account, the log also contains records of changed passwords and changed e-mail addresses (without the actual e-mail addresses being visible).
What do you think? Is this something I should actually add to the website?