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...at the cost of caching (or at least a round trip). Is it necessary to know how many visits per day a particular user made? If # of unique visitors per day/
by rkagerer 4y ago
...at the cost of caching (or at least a round trip).
Is it necessary to know how many visits per day a particular user made? If # of unique visitors per day/week/whatever is sufficiently granular you could retain a corresponding cache window.
Also if this is to avoid those cookie warnings that got popular after GDPR, it should be noted you're still storing information on users' computers. i.e. The stuffed metadata is not so different in principle from a cookie. In this case it seems innocuous, but I wouldn't be surprised to see sites exploit your trick to store a unique last-modified date for each user as a method of tracking (if that's not already commonplace).
- not2b 4y agoThe number of unique visits in a day is the number of total visits minus the number of repeat visits from the same users, so they need something like this to get an accurate count. You can't produce the number without information on repeat visitors. I think you are right that this technique could be changed and turned into a way to track individual users. But as implemented, it doesn't do that, and all knowledge is lost after one day. We shouldn't criticize people who are trying to limit the information they collect to the bare minimum by pointing out an altered version of their system might have undesirable properties.
- rkagerer 4y agoThen the server doesn't need to know about repeat-visits that don't hit it, and it would be nice to maintain caching support if the page content is static.