Initially conceived for distributed computing as part of the Network Computing System (NCS), UUIDs have been used in many different cases where their properties are useful. UUIDs are written as a sequence of hexadecimal digits separated by dashes.īelow is an example of a version 4 UUID as defined by RFC 4122: without communicating with other computers, and is expected to be unique with a very high probability. Universally Unique IDentifiersĪ UUID (Universally Unique IDentifier, also known as GUID - Globally Unique IDentifier) is a 128-bit value that can be generated by a computer independently, i.e. Server-side generated identifiers are pretty much guaranteed to be unique, and before touching production systems, we had to make sure that browsers, too, could generate identifiers that are universally unique. This was problematic because events prior to the response did not have an identifier, so you needed to cross-reference pieces of data to find the events that belonged together. Until now, the ad server was generating a unique identifier and was sending it as part of the ad response. To classify a set of events as referring to the same experience, we need to be able to identify this experience uniquely, and do so from the very beginning, i.e.

An ad experience consists of all the events that occur when a user visits a Web page and loads an ad script, starting with initializing a player for the ad, and including requests to the ad server and user actions such as clicks. Uniquely identifying advertising experiencesĪs an online advertising company, Teads gathers and stores data about each ad experience. A workaround could be (or used to be) to have the CDN generate a unique identifier and store it in a cookie, except that user privacy legislation like GDPR and ePrivacy directives in Europe or the CCPA in the USA prevent cookies to be set until the user has given their unambiguous consent. This means that scripts cannot be generated on-the-fly.

These scripts are almost always loaded from a CDN (Content Delivery Network) whenever they get used at a big enough scale to get optimal response times and to reduce the load on origin servers. Generating unique identifiers is a common need that third-party scripts integrated on Web pages and e-commerce sites have for analytics, marketing purposes, or advertising. Why we need client-side unique identifiers

Uuid generator api