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"Sessions are tracked anonymously without cookies or personally identifying information like IP addresses." Very curious how they are able to do this

• october_sky 7y ago
  I would bet by fingerprinting the visitor's browser window: https://panopticlick.eff.org/ https://panopticlick.eff.org/
• roskilli 7y ago
  Might be using browser local storage APIs? Hah. I imagine you could also do some kind of web socket/long poll and try to fingerprint the connection a little so there’s high likelihood it’s the same session when it reconnects between page loads.
• swyx 7y ago
  good catch! i believe this was a misstatement and have requested we change this wording. for the time being what’s on the docs is what we have https://www.netlify.com/docs/analytics/ https://www.netlify.com/docs/analytics/
  • odensc 7y ago
    But the docs say the same thing? https://www.netlify.com/docs/analytics/#how-it-works https://www.netlify.com/docs/analytics/#how-it-works > Because site activity is tracked anonymously without cookies or personally identifying information, [...]
    • swyx 7y ago
      not quite the same - that statement is more accurate than saying "sessions". "sessions" has a contextual meaning in analytics and our marketing copy misused the term.
• youngtaff 7y ago
  It's possible to track using TLS session resumption techniques but who knows whether they're doing this
• jereze 7y ago
  I'm also very curious about this. Maybe they hash the IP address. But hashing personal data does not guarantee truly anonymisation. This ressource have more details on the topic: https://cnpd.public.lu/content/dam/cnpd/fr/publications/groupe-art29/wp216_en.pdf https://cnpd.public.lu/content/dam/cnpd/fr/publications/grou...