[pdkl95]

It is very well known that cookies are not the only way to track activity. You insistence that Google somehow doesn't do the trivial step of JOINing a few tables together with any of the many possible candidate keys that browsers leak is laughable. Even plain apache logs have the IP address, which is all the "cookie" they need for those of us that have static IP addresses. Even with DHCP, Google only needs to do an INNER JOIN style query to associate that IP with any of the other requests made in the same time period to their servers such as google-analytics.

And all that doesn't even begin to touch "panopticlick" style entropy gathering.

In case you are interested in learning what how Google works, instead only looking at the facade they show you, I suggest watching the presentation[1] Aral Balkan gave at the same event that hosted djb's recent talk (which is also recommended). You won't like it - possibly violently - but maybe you can learn a bit about how the world actually works..

[1] https://projectbullrun.org/surveillance/2015/video-2015.html...