Cumulative sum of unique devices

[jsha]

To contribute to the UX goal of 'make it rewarding to share wifi', we should provide on the dashboard a cumulative count of unique devices that have ever connected to the public net. I.e. 'You have helped X people by providing them with open wireless.'

[jgillula]

Are you thinking we record MAC addresses to make sure we don't double-count repeat devices? Or just increment the count every time a device connects?

[michellereamy]

We could say something like, "Your openwireless network has helped people X times", which would eliminate the need for address collection as it's less specific to # of devices.

On Thu, Jul 17, 2014 at 12:05 AM, Jeremy Gillula [email protected] wrote:

Are you thinking we record MAC addresses to make sure we don't double-count repeat devices? Or just increment the count every time a device connects?

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/EFForg/OpenWireless/issues/130#issuecomment-49234137.

[jsha]

@michellereamy, I like that idea.

One privacy-preserving way we could count uniques is to try and increment a counter every time a client connects that doesn't present an previously-assigned address from DHCP. I think we definitely don't want to record raw MACs or even hashed MACs on OpenWireless routers.

[Rangak]

This may undercount the number of times people have been helped as a device would rerequest IP address assigned from connecting to other openwireless.org routers (i.e since SSID is the same, device will rerequest address even though it is talking to new router). Will give this more thought and see if something better can be done here.