Vivaldi users have some privacy concerns about the way the company tracks each installation. After knowing there is another way to track number of users using Vivaldi browser, the company says starting Vivaldi 2.7 stable they’ll implement that method and assures to remove unique ID from users requests going forward.
In case you don’t know, for every installation of Vivaldi browser a unique user ID will be created and sent to Vivaldi servers located in Iceland. Vivaldi uses Unique ID to know their users count as provide this metric to their search partners and advertisers.
According to Vivaldi privacy policy “Vivaldi (browser) will send a message using HTTPS directly to our servers located in iceland every 24 hours containing this ID, version, CPU architecture, screen resolution and last seen message.” Privacy Policy further clarifies “the purpose of this collection is to determine the total number of active users and their geographic distribution”.
Vivaldi’s developer Julien Picalausa written a long post on this and he summarised what they are going to do to remove Unique ID.
- Starting with our upcoming version Vivaldi 2.7, an additional request to our user counting endpoint will be made. This request is similar to the current one and includes the unique ID, but contains additional parameters that will be used by the new unique ID-free implementation.
- A few versions later, the old user counting request will be removed.
- Even later, the unique ID will be eliminated from the new request altogether. We will keep generating it locally to aid with counting on computers with several Vivaldi installations, but it will only be used locally.
Currently Vivaldi 2.7 is in Snashot verison, stable version will be released shortly. What do you say on this move by Vivaldi?
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