Metrics and your privacy

[Alan]

On Mon, 27 Nov 2006 03:18:01 +0000 (UTC)
Jack Spaar <jspaar at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> Unique identifier tracking is an unnecessary invasion of privacy.

UUIDs are recognized as a *less* invasive mechanism for counting than the
use of IP addresses and mirror logs. The latter may well identify
individuals, their physical location (often down to the street name with
DSL), and if it ever meets advertisers data their purchasing patterns.
Once that person has bought something online through a retailer it
probably also has their credit card profile and entire on and offline
purchase history linked to it as well because in many countries with weak
data protection law this is automatically fed to the big commercial
databases. So an IP address in the wrong hands is enormously informative.

So I'd rather have a UUID, and the kind of UUID suggested here is the
straight 128bit random number. The old MAC address based UUID from the
RFC systems is obsolete because of privacy issues around the MAC.

Alan