I would like to ask about disabling cookies and it’s impact on the reports.
There is methods to create browsers (visitors) fingerprints without using cookies, and it’s over 90% accurate for millions of users, for small websites that woud be much more accurate in term of probabilities.
So if reports are affected by disabeling cookies, because there is information saved in thoese cookies, right? so why not to save this relevant information in the DB if we still can identify every Browser uniquely to match the data stored in the DB with that Browser (visitor).
Well, nice idea hashing browser features
I’m still a little skeptic it would work enough well because of its probabilistic way, but targeted to “don’t track” users would at least help archiving more data about them.
My question is: how much effort is asked the browser? You know js tracking must be as speedy as possible.
You can read full research paper it’s about 16 pages, it’s well explained in details.
Of course if you use it for tracking a very large websites where there is billion users you can have some redundancy in your hash and even that it would be very small probability because of location, language and other parameters and the hash is on 32bits.
I have tested the script and it’s quite fast for hasing these parameters, now to can give a final verdict we need to make some benchmark to see.
and see also our new plugins which uses the fingerprint hash to process number of visitors across multiple websites (that have the same hash): http://plugins.piwik.org/InterSites
just kidding