I agree on all counts, and I agree that it is trivially easy to do hidden IP logging ("invisible.gif" will do it in a heartbeat). That being said, the original poster's point that IP's have different amounts of invasive information depending on where and who you are is an important one. I'm not sure there's anything we can do about it, but we should take it seriously and see if there IS.

The one thing I never want dreamwidth to be is the Zuckerburg family, proudly declaring that other people's security anonymity concerns are nonsense and irrelevant. Which is not what I think anyone here is doing! But I do think these concerns are important and we should think about whether or not there are ways our site security could address them.

(In this case, I don't think there is. But I am not a privacy expert by any stretch of the imagination.)