Simple compromise alternative for user counting
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I know there has been talk of removing the unique userID for about 2 years now and the useragent website issues prevent that as a viable alternative counter. There is a simple solution that both protects individual privacy and fulfills the commercial need for an accurate user count.
Firstly I'll point out that Twitter which uses the same form of revenue stream reports Monthly Active Users. There is no reason why Vivaldi can't do the same.
Instead of pinging a unique userID, change the ping to a 64-bit string which is randomly generated each time a ping is sent. Thus the ping cannot identify a specific machine month to month (or whatever interval ends up being adopted) as it will always be different. It is about a trillion to one that any two strings would match, which is statistically insignificant and you could always make 128-bit if you want to be over the top.
This would give an accurate account of number of users via a means provable to commercial partners without having to assign individual identifiers to specific users.