On Mon, 27 Nov 2006 03:18:01 +0000 (UTC) Jack Spaar <jspaar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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 The old MAC address based UUID from the RFC systems is obsolete because of privacy issues around the MAC.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
