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Can we count users without uniquely identifying them?

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Ubuntu

One of the roles of Canonical relative to Ubuntu is to get Ubuntu pre-installed on as many computers as possible. Canonical does this by working with OEM customers. OEMs are companies that sell assembled computers to people. One of these customers asked Canonical if there was some way that they could know how many computers that they send out with Ubuntu on them keep Ubuntu on them. The customer's engineer came up with a system where they would create a unique identifier for each Ubuntu computer they sold, and then when the computers requested update info daily, it would send that unique identifier with it.

The customer didn't really want to use a unique identifier though, because though it was anonymous, the customer wanted to *count* computers, but unique identifiers are for *tracking* (following a user over time). We mulled it over and over, and finally, based on our experience with web browsers we hit upon a system of non-unique channel identifiers to do the counting. This would make tracking impossible, but of course, tracking is not the goal, counting is.

Non-unique channel identifiers




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