Simetrical wrote:
On 8/30/06, Steve Summit scs@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).