Tracking unique visitors without cookies

voidUpdate•about 1 hour ago

What if we just don't track people? Crazy idea, I know...

close04•about 1 hour ago

I'm sure someone in the ad industry will tell you that the internet is powered by ad revenue, it's what keeps it free and open, what makes services better.

voidUpdate•40 minutes ago

I thought the internet was powered by paying your ISPs bill

ndr•30 minutes ago

It's powered by paying your ISPs bills as much as the restaurant bill is paid by what you spent in car/public-transport commute to the restaurant.

fragmede•about 1 hour ago

I'm not in the advertising business, but people want free shit and don't want to pay for it. How do you suggest it get paid for if not advertising?

ehnto•about 1 hour ago

There are other business models, it depends on what you're building. For a while almost everything coming out of SV was destined to be advertising real estate. Now I think there's more interesting businesses going on. We'll keep strip mining attention to push plastic trinkets into container ships, certainly. Probably no stopping that.

voidUpdate•39 minutes ago

Does advertising absolutely need to track people? Advertising existed for a long time without having to know exactly who would look at the ad

close04•26 minutes ago

Constant tracking isn't necessary for advertising, it's a choice. So is hiding the extent of this tracking from the user. If the user doesn't understand the full scope and impact of the "payment" then the business model is akin to loansharking. Those people also take the deal without realizing it will cost them a finger.

How many fields obscure the form of payment, the amounts, the methods when you purchase a good or service? You're oversimplifying and glossing over the real issues.

If it was as simple as "you must pay" and nothing else mattered, then any form of payment would be justifiable.

MyMemoryfails•36 minutes ago

I think the blog author is misinformed about the session id? If you use that for marketing purposes, you need cookie prompt. The GDRP says only necassary cookies, if you also reuse the login cookies for purposes. It's not longer necassary right?

Otherwise it'd be so blatant loophole, you can only use cookies for their intended purposes and not reuse for them other purposes. I remember some details when i needed a way to prioritize user traffic via cookies, since lots malicous traffic dont have cookie storage, as long i didnt retain the cookie ID used for load balancing, as all information would be lost on reboot of haproxy process. I didnt need cookie prompt, but if i also used that for other purposes like visitor tracking, then I'd need cookie prompt even before setting the cookie.

Im not lawyer, but thats how I understood.

ptx•about 1 hour ago

Next up: Stabbing people without a knife.

If you are tracking people without a lawful basis (e.g. consent), you are violating the GDPR. It doesn't matter if you use cookies. (The article does mention this towards the end.)

ndr•27 minutes ago

It's not (just) GDPR and TFA mentions that as soon as they move on from Cookies, ie point 2 on local storage:

"This buys you nothing. Article 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive".

They clearly have a product to sell but the article seems balanced and offers a good list of commonly used/proposed techniques that are not quite compliant.

As you alluded, there're more lawful basis than consent, one of most common ones being technical necessity to mitigate abuse.

ptx•14 minutes ago

Right, but even if you have a lawful basis for processing the data to collect aggregate statistics (which the article mentions), the GDPR still doesn't allow you to process the data for unrelated purposes such as advertising, which is usually what cookie banners are about. If you're using cookies strictly to implement the expected functionality of the service, there's no problem to begin with - you don't need any banners in that case.

Tracking unique visitors without cookies

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Discussion (14 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews