Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by moioci 2508 days ago
Newbie question: Would it work for publishers to key off of IP address instead of using cookies?
4 comments

Large scale NAT is one reason that would fail. Some mobile carriers have most of their customers behind a handful of IPs. Wikipedia has dealt with this a lot, and has a page explaining why conflating an IP address to a person isn't usually the way to go.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IP_addresses_are_not...

Not really. Problems arise when you have many people behind the same IP. You can hand-wave this problem away for family units behind a router, but you'll soon find out there are entire institutions (schools, office buildings with lots of unrelated companies in them, etc) that will share an IP.
Yes, but with a significant false positive rate due to IP address sharing, and you can get more articles by switching IP’s (unless someone else exhausted the new IP before you got it).
it works for IPv6 (where one IPv6 address really does equal one person)