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Why cares? These are useless as third-party cookies -- you can't track users cross domains! It's a first-party cookie! It's just a hack around analytics soft
by bpodgursky 6y ago
Why cares? These are useless as third-party cookies -- you can't track users cross domains! It's a first-party cookie!
It's just a hack around analytics software needing an on-prem deployment or server-to-server integration. Whatever!
- oehpr 6y agoI dunno if the downvotes are deserved. I think you are correct in that the amount of data exfiltrated is limited. But it's still exfiltrated data, and if the user was given the choice they would almost certainly choose to block such requests. Further, it strikes me that such trackers engaging in this behavior are knowingly subverting user wishes. Which is sort of demonstrating bad faith. I believe attempting to demonstrate the bad faith of tracking companies was a motivator for the DNT flag. They slithered out of that issue by arguing that because people were setting it as default, users didn't effectively consent to not being tracked. This case seems more clear, where they are subverting anti tracking plugins.
- bpodgursky 6y agoI just don't see a functional difference between doing this and sending your server logs to Datadog or Cloudwatch for analysis. It's sorta convenient, but nothing you can't do on the server side with slightly more fuss. There's no cross-site aggregation (much less in-browser tracking) possible in this model, unless I'm missing something major.
- viraptor 6y ago> These are useless as third-party cookies -- you can't track users cross domains http://uniquemachine.org/ http://uniquemachine.org/ As long as you can run scripts, you can be matched between sites. But even before you get into completely unique identifiers, you can get lots of data from repeating ip/location - people are fairly predictable that way.