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Comment by RyanGWU82 | Hacker News Reader

Well, they said that they "made the following changes" -- one of which is not using eTags. So I guess they stopped that.

(That said, they never aggregated this data across multiple websites, so I really don't get what the whole fuss was about.)

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They tried to make their cookies undeletable. Why would they do something like that? The fuss is that it's a bad, dishonest, skeezy thing to do. Kissmetrics has shown that they are not an honest company, they're a dishonest one that will disregard the privacy concerns of their user's visitors.

RyanGWU82 makes a good point though. People only whined about the "evercookie" method of tracking because of the potential for abuse (across multiple Web properties). Why on Earth would you care if someblog.com knows for sure that you've been to their site five times? I don't think the problem here is that you can be tracked using multiple methods that were not originally intended for use in tracking. I think the problem is that people always had a false sense of privacy (i.e., there was ignorance about what can and cannot be used to track your client).

You're accessing a remote server. There will always be a way for sites to track your visits. There is a necessity for those sites to track your visits. Don't care about their necessity to track you? Stop going to those sites.

See, I still don't understand how this is dishonest. They didn't try to make "undeletable cookies," they're not using cookies! I understand that to a layperson "cookie" means "anything that identifies me to a web site," but they're wrong, and what's dishonest about using an analytics mechanism that's not a cookie?

Even if -they- never aggregated the data, does that really mean that nobody aggregated the data? If the clients get raw data, couldn't they (privately) swap data with another client? I assume that if it can be done, it will be done.

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