Technical analysis of client identification mechanisms

chromium.org

57 points·matoffk··7 comments

It's quite funny that a company like Google has both a web security team in charge of squashing fingerprinting methods, and an analytics team in charge of exploiting those very methods to the fullest extent.

Then again it kind of makes sense. Who better knows?

Well, I think it honestly harkens back to Google's original "Don't be evil" motto. I think most of the people at Google want to "Do the right thing" as long as they keep their jobs.

They want to find the right balance, the problem is I think a large portion of Google has lost their way in that regard due to the need to make Google more money. If the volume isn't growing fast enough, they have to find newer...higher margin...options to grow.

After reading the post I don't think "they had lost their way" instead they are trying to find ways to help everyone involved.

I would imagine this has value not just to analytics. Deanonymization has a lot of value in curbing abuse. Privacy is of paramount value, though, so it's hard to reconcile. To me it's a dilemma.

Have you actually looked at how Google Analytics tracks users?

It's very straight forward, nothing like almost anything on this list.

Like cookies? Like shared cookies if you opt-in?

This is a good guide to some of the ways that evercookie uses to live on even after you've cleared cookies:

https://github.com/samyk/evercookie

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