> Option to not use any cookies while still being able to determine returning visitors and unique pageviews.
This strikes me as a potentially non privacy-friendly feature. How is this implemented? I assume some form of fingerprinting must be used?
This strikes me as a potentially non privacy-friendly feature. How is this implemented? I assume some form of fingerprinting must be used?
We're absolutely against fingerprinting as I believe it's better (for the visitor) to just use a cookie in those cases, since they retain control that way. (Delete cookie = be forgotten.)
That's why we opt for a cookie by default, as I believe it is more in "the spirit of the law" than fingerprinting the visitor and storing information about them server-side.
So, when you disable the cookie the plugin falls back on checking the `document.referrer` value for determining returning visitors and unique pageviews. It's a lot less reliable obviously, but some price has to be paid if you do not want to rely on storing something client-side.
What they're talking about is usually described as tracking unique sessions. So, I would see the use of the referrer as a low-complexity, less reliable, but more privacy-friendly way of tracking unique sessions.
What if you completely separated them, and tracked and displayed both for cookie users? Users who disable cookies would then have historical data in the same unit.
Or a warning would probably work fine.
Fingerprinting is the next most reliable way but raises all sorts of data-retention issues. Maybe it is acceptable if the fingerprints are only stored for a very short period of time (say 1 hour).
For my home-brewed analytics system I eventually decided that the trade off wasn't worth it. I just count page views rather than visitors. I know it isn't industry standard, but I don't care and nobody in "the industry" is going to trust self-hosted analytics for anything anyway.