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Reputation: 52500

JavaScript code to determine a unique website visitor without resorting to supercookies?

For the purposes of a web analytics engine, is there a good JavaScript library for setting/getting a unique identifier for a visitor? I'm aware of evercookie, but that's a bit harsh for my purposes. I don't like the idea of infecting visitors with anything they can't remove if they really want to and evercookie is also heavy in that it can actually slow down a browser.

I simply want to give website owners as accurate a count as possible of their unique visitors. If a website visitor really doesn't want to be tracked that way, that's fine and understandable. They should have the option to not be tracked by disabling cookies or some other mechanism like a setting by the website owner.

Tracking unique visitors by cookies alone seems too unreliable.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 8352

Answers (1)

Tushar Gupta
Tushar Gupta

Reputation: 15913

Oki so this question is the leading problem right now in the Web Analytics Industry. Still, there is no reliable mechanism that can give you accurate results.

I have tried various options, the most accurate so far is :

Browser Fingerprint:

  • Identifying an individual user by the unique patterns of information visible whenever a computer visits a website.
  • The information collected is quite comprehensive and often includes the browser type and version, operating system and version, screen resolution, supported fonts, plugins, time zone, language and font preferences, and even hardware configurations. These identifiers may seem generic and not at all personally identifying, yet typically only one in several million people have exactly the same specifications as you.

The js file can be found here: https://github.com/Valve/fingerprintjs2

You can also use FB pixel, use its people id to stitch the users across the devices, sessions etc. But that's a big deal and you need massive engineering effort to do the same.

Upvotes: 6

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