4 ms·

I 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

• o_m 4y ago
  Counting to two is needed to handle the bounce rate.
• kube-system 4y ago
  3 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 ago
  Consider 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 ago
    I 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 ago
      You’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.