Simetrical wrote:
On 8/30/06, Steve Summit <scs(a)eskimo.com>
wrote:
But what if we logged a one-way hash of the IP
address, that
couldn't be correlated with anything else?
There are only about four billion possible IP addresses. Anyone could
just do a brute-force execution of whatever hashing algorithm we use
on every IP address.
Well, no, not just "anyone". :-)
Really, though, there's no harm in storing IP
address-pageview links for a short period of time, like a day.
I would tend to agree. But three people at AOL lost their jobs
because of something they honestly thought there was "no harm" in
doing. And it's very difficult (if not impossible) to guarantee
that something gets kept for only a day.
However, this wouldn't require that, and indeed, a
server-side
solution would be impossible: 99.9% of page hits won't go to the
server to start with.
Not sure what you mean here.
Since JavaScript is being used anyway, you can just
have the script
only run the first time you visit a given page per session.
But that would be considerably more work to implement, and would
require arbitrary amounts of state kept in the browser, and would
break down if the browser were restarted (or perhaps just if the
tab or window were closed).