Re:Show HN: Plausible – Self-Hosted Google Analytics alterna...
by markosaric on Tuesday October 06, 2020 @11:07AM
(#24698426)
downsides are basically that in order to gain the benefits for the user privacy and compliance with regulations, you lose a bit of accuracy depending on the situation. we cannot see whether the same person returns to a site on a different day so count them as a new unique visitor.
i assume that using the referrer header to count uniques has even more downsides as i imagine the number of unique visitors with that method would be much higher than it actually is.
That's a pretty interesting technique!
I built a privacy friendly analytics project https://github.com/sheshbabu/freshlytics and I've been wondering how to correctly count unique visitors to a website. I don't store cookies or any PII data at all so by definition, it's hard to distinguish between two different visits - are they from same person or different people?
An alternative approach is used by Simple Analytics - https://docs.simpleanalytics.com/uniques where they use referrer header to derive unique visits. They mention that they don't use IP addresses as they're considered fingerprinting.
But it looks like a hash function (whose salt gets rotated daily) strikes a good balance between fingerprinting while maintaining user privacy. Any downsides to this approach?