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Comment by tappio | Hacker News Reader

There are many analytics solutions that dont require cookies. You can do aggregated analytics just fine without. Saving preferences does not require consent either.

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My understanding is that any front-end analytics solution will require consent. You're right about explicitly set preferences. I was mixing that up with inferred preferences.

It depends on what is to be analyzed.

How many requests per second are being served? How many error codes were delivered to clients? How quickly the service responded? Service logs without PII? All perfectly fine to aggregate and analyze without consent.

How long did it take x user to navigate from x screen to y screen is one of the most valuable metrics for any site, and most people consider this to require consent. Or at least it not being worth the risk to not ask.

Acting dense like this isn't productive... And literally this information would be stores as anonymous user 12345, but that still would require consent (probably, or at least arguably).

>How long did it take x user to navigate from x screen to y screen is one of the most valuable metrics for any site

Stats like that are only used to implement dark patterns better and justify user hostile decisions since pretty much the time the idea of telemetry was introduced. Otherwise, we'd live in the world of perfect web ui and we're not.

That can be implemented. Within a session you don't need to know it's the same person tomorrow, so a per-day key derived server-side is enough to measure that someone took 40 seconds from x to y. No cookie, no localStorage, nothing stored on the device, nothing to consent to. Hash ip + user agent + your domain with a secret salt that rotates and is destroyed every 24 hours, and you are on the safe side. Of course, recognizing users across days requires consent. But is that really necessary?

In the world of zscaler, CGNAT & corporate proxies, IP address is nowhere near enough.

Or use some JS to put the time-on-page in the next request, right?

Is it a violation to send data that could theoretically be used for more invasive tracking than you actually do? I don't think so, or else you'd need consent just to receive an IP packet.

that's not true at all, plausible can be configured to require 0 consent

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