filip0409's comments

On: Show HN: Sell advertisement spots on your site wit...

[filip0409]

Wow cool idea! One question, How are you tracking the unique visitors?

[karrob → filip0409]

Thank you!

TLDR; Each IP is counted as a unique visitor.

To account for multiple devices from the same IP, if same IP visits two days in a row, two unique visitors are counted.

For privacy reasons, IP is not stored, but the sha256 hash of the IP is, so I can not easily track users.

[karrob → karrob]

To increase the privacy even more, you could hash the week number + year as well, as well as more things, but for the launch and MVP, we are sticking with hash of just the IP.

[whatevermom → karrob]

Same thing, could be precomputed and cracked easily. Please spare yourself the trouble, because it’ll be useless. And don’t come claiming that your tool respects privacy…

[karrob → whatevermom]

I'll figure something out, not the primary focus at the moment. Probably gonna do something like https://www.simpleanalytics.com/. Nonetheless, visits are not tied to any user except just a hashed IP and I can't "track" them outside the sites using SponsorApp.

Doing analytics always needs SOME kind of tracking, you'll see that it is not a problem, it is FAR better than letting Google track you using AdSense, that you can agree to.

Besides, everything is deleted after 7 days. Do yourself a favor and lower your cortisol levels, your body will thank you when you get older

[whatevermom → karrob]

Lol just having fun at you bragging about your highly technical privacy measures, having a conversation with your alt account, even though they could be bypassed by a monkey on crack. Good point on the cortisol though… good luck with the hustle

[whatevermom → karrob]

Sha256 is NOT an appropriate measure to anonymize IP addresses.

You can easily precompute the SHA256 hashes of all IP addresses and do a simple JOIN to get the original IPs.

I am concerned for you OP.

[6forward → karrob]

This is excellent! Question: How does the tracking handle private relays (like iCloud Private Relay)?

[karrob → 6forward]

Thanks, it'll do for the time being, but the goal is to maximize the privacy for this tracking as well, maybe do something like https://docs.simpleanalytics.com/what-we-collect in the future.

I'm not sure how many users use private relays, but I guess it is not too many to severely skew the statistics.