New Method of Tracking UIP Hits?

smurray writes "iMediaConnection has an interesting article on a new approach to web analysis. The author claims that he is describing 'new, cutting edge methodologies for identifying people, methodologies that -- at this point -- no web analytics product supports.' What's more interesting, the new technology doesn't seem to be privacy intrusive." Many companies seem unhappy with the accepted norms of tracking UIP results. Another approach to solving this problem was also previously covered on Slashdot.

I'm glad it isn't Rocket Science

[elronxenu]

He fails to consider the possibility of the same user using different browsers (and hence the same IP address, but different cookies, and a different browser identification string).

So you can use probabilistic means to identify unique visitors. That's not a paradigm shift, except for those whose paradigms are already very small.

Somehow I don't think this research is worthy of an NDA.

Re:CPUID

[KillShill]

Treacherous/Insidious Computing to the rescue.

no need for cpu id's when your entire system and its OS will generate a 128bit id for you. and give them out to "trusted" "partners".

remote attestation never sounded so good.

Some additional steps.

[Saggi]

The article uses a lot of time to establish that this is a paradigm shift, when it's actually not. I do believe their idea is good, but basically it's just applying a lot of "possible" user identifiers and merge them together to form a unified result.

Some of the identifiers they haven't used are linkage on the site. If one page links to another, it might be the same user, if the pages are called in sequence.

On top of links "time" might be applied. Some links are expected to be clicked fast, others after some reading on the page.

Some may argue that linkage is what you want to determine in the following analysis, and can't therefore be used to determine the use in advance, but this is not true. The determination of the user uniqueness looks to see if its possible for the user to get from one page to an other, while the analysis want to determine if they did it.