6 ms·

I have that information, I don't need cookies for it, and neither does anyone else. I don't know why this (false) use case gets banded about so much, but my go

• stingraycharles 5y ago
  Reliably identifying a (unique) visitor is pretty difficult using ip logs, though. Cookies generally make this much easier, at the very least identifying a visit. With ip logs, you’re not just dealing with the fact that IP addresses are often shared between people (eg behind a NAT), you now also need to record IP addresses, which arguably is an even bigger privacy violation than just using cookies. I’m not saying that one method is always better than the other, but it’s definitely not as black-and-white as you make it out to be.
  • kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    Publucations, radio, and TV were profitable without identifying unique users. Why does a website require this?
    • QuikAccount 5y ago
      Nielsen ratings would disagree with this.
      • IanCal 5y ago
        I think that's a disingenuous reading. Nielsen ratings are for small subsets of users who explicitly opt in to tracking. That's not the same as "uniquely identify all end users of my website" it's like paying user testers.
        • scarface74 5y ago
          Nielsen tried it’s best to get a demographically representative sample of households. It wasn’t purely a self selected sample. I doubt people were incentivized by the $5 they put in envelopes.
          • IanCal 5y ago
            I didn't say self selected, I said opt in.
    • scarface74 5y ago
      In addition to the sibling poster’s comment, publications had data on what parts of town and stores sold their publications at newsstands and the names and addresses of subscribers. Before you could get free publications like MacWeek, you had to fill out demographic data to qualify.
  • godelski 5y ago
    How fine grained detail do you actually need? I can't see how knowing if one person or two people in a house visited you're site helps. They could have easily just switched to their phone. For logging, just hash it with a salt.
    • tantalor 5y ago
      > just hash it with a salt This would not satisfy privacy maximalists because you can easily unmask users later.
    • davidmurdoch 5y ago
      Hashing is borderline PII since you can feasibly reverse it to a unique IP, unless you use a slow hashing function like bcrypt.
  • baltbalt 5y ago
    A single user may use different cookies depending on the device they use so either way it's unreliable.
    • Puts 5y ago
      Or like all of us who delete all cookies automatically when closing the browser.
    • nicbou 5y ago
      It does not need to be perfectly reliable, just reliable enough
      • tjoff 5y ago
        So, in other words, no need for cookies...
  • chimeracoder 5y ago
    > Reliably identifying a (unique) visitor is pretty difficult using ip logs, though. > Cookies generally make this much easier, at the very least identifying a visit. You don't actually need cookies to reliably identify unique users. Browser fingerprinting is very identifiable and difficult to obscure. https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
    • minusf 5y ago
      if it was that effective, why wouldn't just google switch to it and stop wasting money on ideas like FLoC, and ditch 3rd party cookies?
      • chimeracoder 5y ago
        > if it was that effective, why wouldn't just google switch to it and stop wasting money on ideas like FLoC, and ditch 3rd party cookies? First, I would be shocked if Google isn't using fingerprinting data in conjunction with cookies. But also, this comment misunderstands what FLoC was. FLoC was, at least in theory, an attempt to get the benefits of targeted advertising without uniquely identifying users. That's what the "C" in FLoC refers to - users aren't targeted individually, but rather by the cohort they belong to. FLoC unfortunately had many issues, one of which is that there were concerns that the cohorts were too granular and could still effectively denanonymize users. There's some research indicating that this was the case - FLoC cohorts revealed more info than they intended to, but also still less than individualized profiles do. The stated goal of FLoC was actually more privacy-focused than the status quo (individualized profiles). Unfortunately, that's not what ended up happening - or at least, the general public didn't trust that it was.
        • minusf 5y ago
          fingerprinting probably brings in more identifyable bits, but without the cookies it would not be commercially reliable data to determine uniqueness. i am aware what FLoC was and tried to be. it was a horrible idea with it's default optin putting onus on website operators to add headers to opt-out from a mass survelience exercise generating money for the surveillance capitalists.
  • tjoff 5y ago
    Why do you think you need to uniquely identify all your visitors? Is that truly worth ruining your website and annoy your users to start? There are very few things in life that are truly as black and white as this.
    • shadowgovt 5y ago
      > Why do you think you need to uniquely identify all your visitors? Why would I not? A brick-and-mortar store can tell when the same person walks in twice; it's easy to imagine webmasters wanting that too (to stay noting of having a chance of distinguishing real people from bots and scrapers).
      • vikaveri 5y ago
        Most brick and mortar stores can not reliably tell whether any single person has visited the store before unless they track them in some way. Probably only case is the store owner who is also the only worker with excellent memory for faces and details.
• ec109685 5y ago
  How can you measure unique users if they are using Apple’s PrivateRelay?