How does free limited digital subscription work without authentication?

Question

I see on every news website that I am limited to a certain number of articles I can view without login. I thought that cookies were involved in doing this, but now I have tried deleting all cookies and again I am blocked from viewing more pages beyond my quota.

So can anyone provide an explanation on how this system works??

Answer 1

Web sites can use different strategies to track your usage.

Cookies are often used for that. A website can also store cookies via sub-requests to other domains it controls (for example tracker.com and website.com). To be sure you should delete all cookies of all sites.

A set of techniques allow to restore cookies even after the user deleted them. Such cookies are called Zombie cookies or Evercookies. For example, a website can rely on storage in the Flash plugin.

Even without cookies, web sites can collect a lot of information to uniquely identify the user. For example, the browser sends for each request a string with information about the version of the browser, the operating system and so on.

Your IP address, used to connect to the website, is uniquely assigned to you during some period of time. If your ISP provided you a dynamic IPv4 address assigned by DHCP, you could release the IP address and try to get another one.

When re-connecting to the website, use an URL without any personally unique identifier. A part of the URL could contain some gibberish to track the user, for example: http://example.com/top/article/how-i-learned-to-love-stackoverflow-ef45gtrzs3ggre2354gre. It's better to type the website domain again (http://example.com) and browse to the pages you want to read.

Before connecting to web sites which you don't want them tracking you, it's recommended to use the "Private" modes of web browsers. On Google Chrome, it's called incognito mode.

Answer 2

There are other ways websites can store data on your computer besides cookies: Cache, Local Storage, IndexedDB, Media Cache, Session Storage, History, Extension State.

For example, on a windows machine, the Chrome Browsers puts a ton of data in C:\Users[user]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data. You can watch it fill up as you browse sites.

The data is mostly encrypted, hashed, or stored as binary making it impractical to decipher.

So, it's not really mapping you, the user, to a page or site. Rather, the site uses your browser's memory (i.e. hundreds/thousands of files on your hard drive) to keep track of the activity.