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It's still easy for anyone to work out how fast you're gaining users. Just sign up for an account every day and note how much higher the new id is.
by jstanley 8y ago
It's still easy for anyone to work out how fast you're gaining users. Just sign up for an account every day and note how much higher the new id is.
- thecatspaw 8y agoyou can also add zeroes (or other digits which get stripped before used for querying) at the end, that way the gain looks orders of magnitudes faster
- jstanley 8y agoSure, but anyone signing up for 3 accounts in quick succession can probably figure out what you're doing. All of these problems go away if you just assign random numbers instead.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoWhy would honest people want to spend time implementing ways to lie to their users? Because that's what we're talking about here. (And I know I'm asking a rhetorical question.)
- jstanley 8y agoAssigning random ids isn't lying to your users, unless you also make representations that the user id corresponds to the number of users that there are.
- verbify 8y agoWhile there might be some edge cases (e.g. startups associated with a high profile brand/person), in most cases there are usually better things for a startup to do than obfuscate the number of users they're gaining.