I have that information, I don't need cookies for it, and neither does anyone else.
I don't know why this (false) use case gets banded about so much, but my gods does it annoy me.
I don't know why this (false) use case gets banded about so much, but my gods does it annoy me.
Cookies generally make this much easier, at the very least identifying a visit.
With ip logs, you’re not just dealing with the fact that IP addresses are often shared between people (eg behind a NAT), you now also need to record IP addresses, which arguably is an even bigger privacy violation than just using cookies.
I’m not saying that one method is always better than the other, but it’s definitely not as black-and-white as you make it out to be.
Is that truly worth ruining your website and annoy your users to start?
There are very few things in life that are truly as black and white as this.
Why would I not? A brick-and-mortar store can tell when the same person walks in twice; it's easy to imagine webmasters wanting that too (to stay noting of having a chance of distinguishing real people from bots and scrapers).
For logging, just hash it with a salt.
This would not satisfy privacy maximalists because you can easily unmask users later.
> Cookies generally make this much easier, at the very least identifying a visit.
You don't actually need cookies to reliably identify unique users. Browser fingerprinting is very identifiable and difficult to obscure.
First, I would be shocked if Google isn't using fingerprinting data in conjunction with cookies.
But also, this comment misunderstands what FLoC was. FLoC was, at least in theory, an attempt to get the benefits of targeted advertising without uniquely identifying users. That's what the "C" in FLoC refers to - users aren't targeted individually, but rather by the cohort they belong to.
FLoC unfortunately had many issues, one of which is that there were concerns that the cohorts were too granular and could still effectively denanonymize users. There's some research indicating that this was the case - FLoC cohorts revealed more info than they intended to, but also still less than individualized profiles do.
The stated goal of FLoC was actually more privacy-focused than the status quo (individualized profiles). Unfortunately, that's not what ended up happening - or at least, the general public didn't trust that it was.
i am aware what FLoC was and tried to be. it was a horrible idea with it's default optin putting onus on website operators to add headers to opt-out from a mass survelience exercise generating money for the surveillance capitalists.
Well, you asked (perhaps rhetorically) why Google didn't switch to using fingerprinting instead of FLoC. And the answer is that FLoC and fingerprinting suit different use cases. Fingerprinting doesn't serve the goals of FLoC, and FLoC doesn't provide the same data that fingerprinting would.
Before you could get free publications like MacWeek, you had to fill out demographic data to qualify.
Nielsen ratings are for small subsets of users who explicitly opt in to tracking. That's not the same as "uniquely identify all end users of my website" it's like paying user testers.