Allow enabling infer_ip without enabling all default PII

[bagedevimo]

Problem Statement

We really don't want to collect (for example) session cookie Set-Cookie headers, so keeping includeDefaultPii disabled gives us a lot more safety that no accidents will occur. However, IP is frequently very helpful for debugging issues. Since the changes in 10.4.0, there is no way to have includeDefaultPii: false but still collect the inferred IP in Relay.

Solution Brainstorm

You can pass _metadata: { sdk: { settings: { infer_ip: "auto" } } } to Sentry.init() to get access force enable infer_ip, however this is other side-effects like preventing the sdk name and version being sent through to the sentry server.

It feels like the there could be a way to specify you'd like to enable this specific feature somehow when calling Sentry.init, which is merged into the default _metadata. Alternatively, when the user-supplied _metadata.sdk.settings block is merged into BrowserClient, it could handle this case by still inserting other values required for full functioning of the SDK.

Additional Context

No response

Priority

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[linear]

JS-1593

[Lms24]

Hey @bagedevimo thanks for writing in! The good news here is that we plan on making sendDefaultPii much more fine grained, to enable use cases such as yours. The bad news is that this is still in a planning phase, so I can't give you an ETA for when it'll land.

Which SDK are you using? Usually the _metadata option should be merged top-down, so I wonder if there's some kind of bug we could fix to enable the workaround you proposed.

[bagedevimo]

Just browser.. I think this is a failing test case?

commit 3ad068ff339f082091fa3f18b6c8f302bedb7a2c
Author: Ben Anderson <ben@delivereasy.co.nz>
Date:   Fri Jan 30 10:01:18 2026 +1300

    Add test for SDK metadata being set when other metadata supplied

diff --git a/packages/browser/test/client.test.ts b/packages/browser/test/client.test.ts
index d99e45984..db0bc8c06 100644
--- a/packages/browser/test/client.test.ts
+++ b/packages/browser/test/client.test.ts
@@ -211,6 +211,26 @@ describe('SDK metadata', () => {
         },
       });
     });
+
+    it('still sets otherr SDK metadata if some passed in', () => {
+      const options = getDefaultBrowserClientOptions({
+        _metadata: {
+          sdk: {
+            settings: {
+              infer_ip: 'auto'
+            }
+          },
+        },
+      });
+      const client = new BrowserClient(options);
+
+      expect(client.getOptions()._metadata?.sdk).toEqual({
+        name: 'sentry.javascript.angular',
+        settings: {
+          infer_ip: 'auto',
+        },
+      });
+    });
   });
 
   describe('sdk data', () => {