6 ms·
That’s pretty clever. I think if you really want to keep it privacy respecting, you should stop counting at 1 - so you can distinguish the first vs subsequent v
by tobr 4y ago
That’s pretty clever. I think if you really want to keep it privacy respecting, you should stop counting at 1 - so you can distinguish the first vs subsequent visits, but you can’t tell if someone has visited 2 or 200 times.
- AkshatJ27 4y agowhat is the problem with letting a website know how many times I have visited the page? How is it better for a website to only know if I have visited earlier or not?
- xyproto 4y agoMany clients may have visited only one time, but when you reach higher numbers they may be used together with other data to help identify users. Maybe only one user will have over 100 visits, and then you can uniquely identify them.
- barefeg 4y agoMakes sense. I’m not very experienced in privacy but could you explain why uniquely identifying the user is a problem? As in you can tell that there’s one user who visited 100 times but how can you use that information to correlate with an identity?
- _justinfunk 4y agoThis is also my question that all the people wearing their smart lawyer hats seem to be claiming but not explaining.
- xyproto 4y agoMainly for targeting ads, I guess.
- cortesoft 4y agoI am having trouble understanding how knowing someone has visited three times is more privacy invasive than knowing they visited twice. What is so magical about 3?
- o_m 4y agoCounting to two is needed to handle the bounce rate.
- kube-system 4y ago3 is magical in that it comes after 2. If 100 people visited once, and one person visited twice... then a new request with visitCount=3 is that second person.
- tobr 4y agoConsider that there’s some long tail of visitors who visit many times in one day. Someone is going to be visiting more times than anyone else, whether that’s 10 or 100 or 1000 page views. That person is now uniquely trackable. To avoid that situation you need to stop counting somewhere, and you’re not really getting any new info after 1 (well, 2 I suppose, if you want to track bounces), so you might as well stop there.
- dahfizz 4y agoI don't agree that the existence of this header makes a user more trackable. You can already uniquely identify visitors with their IP & source port, which is included in every single packet and is way more specific than some timestamp. Your argument seems to be that this timestamp in the header could possibly be used as a lookup key in a database of visitors. I think that's a stretch, but in any case that database would be the privacy violating thing. This header is completely anonymous.
- tobr 4y agoYou’re probably right! But since they aren’t getting any more info by continuing to count after 2, it’s just a liability to do it. After all, the whole point of the setup seems to be to minimize the amount of unique information the system has to process.
- WirelessGigabit 4y agoEvery subsequent visit they bump up the number.