Device specific data with no sign-in

[Jeff_Hager]

Here’s a couple posts with my take on the whole thing. Fingerprinting a specific user or device without them signing in is complex, not 100% reliable, not 100% foolproof, and not secure as stated above. Even using the CSS Library app as an example, it seems that it often forgets who I am whenever I visit the page and have to register each time. I would love to be able to identify a specific device for one of my use cases, but the only reliable options I have are to have a separate sign in or a separate app for that device.

Unique User ID that will not change for an anonymous user

Reliably tracking users with 100% accuracy without requiring the user to sign in is next to impossible. It’s somewhat possible using browser agent info, or attempting to collect user info without consent, but not 100% reliable. All major browsers make it very difficult to do. It’s a battle that ad agencies attempt to overcome every day, which also forces browsers to lock things down more to protect user privacy. I should add that attempting to do something like this opens up a whole bunch of…

Save choice with "no sign-in" User access

If a user is not signed in, there is no reliable way to identify which user the data belongs to. You can go down a rabbit hole of scraping together various pieces of device info to identify a user’s device, but this is challenge for even the largest advertising companies that try to track ad views. The thing is, browsers make there best effort to protect your privacy, so it’s very hard from the developer side to reliably track a specific user or link data to that user if they have not identifie…