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= Anonymous alternative = | = Anonymous alternative = | ||
The following is an alternative approach, proposed by Ben Bucksch: | |||
For simplicity, I will take the number of crashes (e.g. in the last week or overall) as data point that you want to gather. The data itself is anonymous and can (apart from fingerprinting, more to that later) not identify a single user. | |||
1. Avoiding UUID | |||
So, now you wanted to know which profiles are not used anymore (dormant, retention problem) and which characteristics they have. This is inherently difficult, but it is possible with the following algo: | |||
You submit: | |||
Age of profile (Firefox installation) in days - e.g. 500 | |||
Date of last submission - e.g. 2012-01-18 | |||
Current date (from client perspective) - only date, not time - e.g. 2012-01-20 | |||
Number of crashes - e.g. 15 | |||
Number of crashes submitted last time - e.g. 10 | |||
Then, on the server, you write that information in a database, as such: | |||
Date of submission | Age of installation | Crash count | Number of users | |||
2012-01-20 | 500 | 15 | 100000 | |||
Any additional user also submitting today the same combination "age 500, crash count 15" increases the "number of users" column by 1. | |||
Also, you look up the row for the last submission, namely | |||
2012-01-18 | 498 | 10 | 20001 | |||
and decrease the number of users by 1. | |||
If the user decides that there were too many crashes and switches to Chrome, he will be stranded on the row "2012-01-20 | 500 | 15 | 5000", because users who have continued to use FF have been subtracted already. So, you can say with certainty that there were 5000 users who used Firefox the last time on 2012-01-20, after having used Firefox for 500 days, and they had 15 crashes (per day/week, whatever you submit) when they stopped using Firefox. | |||
As you told me, that is exactly the information you are so desperately seeking. Dere, you has it. Without tracking any individual user, it's completely anonymous. | |||
2. Avoiding Fingerprinting. | |||
Now, what about all the other information that you need: startup times, addons, etc.? If we just add all that information to the same table and row, it would allow fingerprinting. But that is not necessary. You merely make one table per atomic information. I.e. | |||
Table A | |||
Date of submission | Age of installation | Crash count | Number of users | |||
Table B | |||
Date of submission | Age of installation | startuptime | Number of users | |||
or of course whatever other database schema you want, as long as each value is separate. That takes care of the fingerprinting. | |||
At least on the server side, not on the submission side. I would have to trust you, and anything between you and me. It would be possible to separate the calls and submit each value separately, but I think that would be overdoing it. | |||