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Anatomy of Google analytics cookies

devblog.eduhub.nl

30 points by wasigh 15 years ago · 6 comments

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CWIZO 15 years ago

Since Google is so keen on improving the speed of the internet (and good for them for that) I'm looking forward to the day when they'll only use one cookie for all their tracking (if that's even possible). GA is, by Google's standards, a speed hog right now, and Page speed always complains about it ...

dude_abides 15 years ago

Just wondering: Why doesn't a webserver encrypt the cookie value with a server-side key? This way, the information in the cookie (timestamps, pageviews, number of sessions etc.) can be safe from wireshark sniffers.

  • calloc 15 years ago

    That would have to be done on Google's end, that is not something webmasters using Google Analytics are able to do by themselves.

    • dude_abides 15 years ago

      Yep. I'm wondering why Google, in this case, wouldn't encrypt the value stored in its cookie. Is there any technical reason other than laziness?

      • calloc 15 years ago

        I believe the cookies are set and manipulated by JavaScript, as such I'm not even sure it would be a good idea...

toddh 15 years ago

Nice, I always wondered how they worked.

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