July 13, 2026
Now you see me, now you’re tracked
Tracking unique visitors without cookies
The no-cookie tracking debate instantly turned into a privacy food fight
TLDR: The article says websites can still estimate returning visitors without cookies, but each method comes with privacy and legal trade-offs. In the comments, readers turned it into a blunt moral debate: some called the whole idea creepy, while others argued “not using cookies” doesn’t make tracking any less invasive.
A seemingly dry post about counting unique visitors without using cookies somehow lit up the comments like a reality-show reunion. The article tries to explain a simple but loaded question: if websites want to know whether you’ve been there before, how can they do it without dropping a little file on your device? It walks through the usual tricks — cookies, browser storage, and more invisible methods — while insisting the trade-offs are messy and often hidden from users. In plain English: websites still want numbers, but people really don’t want to feel watched.
And wow, the community was not in a patient, “let’s hear both sides” mood. One camp basically said, why are we doing this at all? Commenter voidUpdate dropped the thread’s cleanest mic-drop: “What if we just don’t track people?” Another commenter, ptx, came in swinging with the line everyone is going to repeat: this is like “stabbing people without a knife,” arguing that changing the method doesn’t magically make tracking okay under privacy law. That’s where the real drama landed: not on the tech itself, but on whether this is just surveillance with better branding.
Then came the legal nitpicking, with commenters arguing over whether reusing things like login or session IDs would be an obvious loophole. Translation: the crowd suspects some companies are playing a game of “it’s not a cookie, so it’s fine,” and the comments were absolutely not buying it. The vibe was equal parts privacy panic, courtroom cross-examination, and dark meme energy.
Key Points
- •The article argues that counting unique visitors requires some method of recognizing that multiple requests came from the same browser.
- •It identifies cookies, localStorage, and fingerprinting as major techniques analytics tools use to identify returning browsers.
- •It says first-party cookies still work technically but are subject to ePrivacy consent requirements and browser restrictions such as Safari’s seven-day cap on script-set cookies.
- •It states that localStorage and similar browser storage methods do not avoid consent rules because ePrivacy covers storing or accessing information on a user’s device beyond cookies alone.
- •It says fingerprinting creates identifiers from browser characteristics without storing data locally, making it durable and difficult for users to clear, while noting that Margin claims not to use cookies, localStorage, or fingerprinting libraries.