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Working for a company that takes privacy very seriously, I can say that it can be a PITA. Worth doing, but still a PITA. We had to resort to some clever tricker
by fhd2 13y ago
Working for a company that takes privacy very seriously, I can say that it can be a PITA. Worth doing, but still a PITA. We had to resort to some clever trickery just to count monthly active users without any sort of unique identifier. I bet DDG faces similar challenges.
- yegg 13y agoSpot on, but worth it!
- grey-area 13y agoOut of curiosity, what solution did you hit upon? Google uses a cookie to tie visits to a certain user for analytics. The other solution I've come up with is to use a hash of IP + other identifying info, so not recording the IP or anytihng to tie it to a person, but still recording a relatively unique ID. What sort of techniques are you using?
- fhd2 13y agoWell, we have daily update requests (it's not a web app), so we knew the number of daily users already. But we really wanted to know the monthly users, gives a way better idea of the actual user numbers. What we ended up doing is to transmit the timestamp of the last update check with each update check, that way we can see which requests are the first over an arbitrary period. Granted, the situation is probably not that similar to what DDG faces, but it was just one issue that came up. What we use for web analytics is based on awstats, which operates on access logs with anonymised IPs. Not as good as Google Analytics, but as useful as it gets without JS/tracking, I guess.
- grey-area 13y agoThanks