Why? It’s anonymous and doesn’t collect any user data other than IP and stuff from the user agent
You have somehow perverted GDPR to believe it to mean `no client may ever hold a unique state`. Good luck to anyone making a claim that this is NOT possible in anything but the most rudimentary application.
Multiple requests end up with the same time stamp which means individuals are not traceable but as an aggregate countable
Edit: I misread the article here, where it said each visit incremented the counter by one second. So my calculation is not correct!
(edit: spelling)
~Every HTTP response has a Date field with a second-resolution timestamp that might be unique. Are you equally concerned about that?
both you and i visit the same new site today, we both get a file our browser caches with today's date at 00:00:01. Tomorrow when we go to the same site, our browser says we got the file yesterday, so the server sends a new modified date to the browser, set to tomorrow's date at 00:00:02. Both of us have the same "new" file with the new modification date/time.
if i go back the following day, the only thing the server knows for certain, from just this header, is that i've visited twice before. So i'm not counted as a unique visitor.
That this could be used by assigning a unique timestamp to each visitor is where everyone's mind is going, and it feels like half are annoyed there's another way to leak information, and the other half are annoyed they didn't think of it prior to the end-of-year marketing bonus deadline.
However, it sounds like they're using it just for quite minimal tracking. It sounds like the only thing they're tracking is how many people viewed the site how many times. They'll know that on a particular day, 1 person viewed the site 500 times, but won't know anything identifying about that person (e.g. IP, name, gender, any sort of unique ID).