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Comment by dvko | Hacker News Reader

Hey, glad you ask because I feel strongly about this!

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.

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I don't think it's at all clear from the term that returning visitors wouldn't include someone who visited your page from a search page, went back, made a new search, and clicked on a different page on the same site. That seems contrary to the industry standard definitions. I'd encourage you to call it something else

I agree. A returning visitor is someone who visited your site before and now they're back again. The "return" in returning visitor is the fact that they left and came back.

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.

Sorry, this is indeed what I meant to say. Will update the text!

Do you store it as the same record type as the cookie-based metric? If I decided to stop using cookies that would make aggregates of the data very misleading.

We do - I’ll see if we can add in a warning message if changing that setting while a lot of data has already been tracked. Or perhaps mark it in the graph, so the difference comes with an explanation. What would you do?

I'm not sure. It seems like they are totally different metrics and visitors who came from another page on your site might be an interesting metric to cookie users.

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.

You probably can also use IP addresses to match at least some of the returning users.

Not an option as the plugin does not store anything visitor specific, not even for a second. Would make it considerably harder to scale as well.

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