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Originally Posted by manxminx
My thought though is that no matter how random the number is, it refers to the type of ads they serve to your computer, so It must be personal, if not to you, then certainly to your computer!
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As there is one number assigned per browser per user per ip then the number would refer to your use of a particular browser in a particular account on a given machine. This is surely personal information. Even if a person can have more than one id associated its still personal information, e.g. bank account numbers. The fact that it is linked to several ad streams is the mechanism by which PHORM works to serve up relevant ads.
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Originally Posted by dav
I've seen a quote from someone in Phorm this week that the cookie number is actually Pseudorandom. I would imagine that in cryptography circles, that particular word gets a hearty laugh, a nudge and a wink.
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All computer generated random numbers are pseudorandom due to the fact that computers, being machines, can't actually generate truely random numbers. This is probably more of the smoke screen. In actual fact, its probably a UUID of some sort that they generate. If they used a lottery machine or something then they could generate true random numbers but they wouldn't be guaranteed unique.
But the point is, random, pseudorandom or even sequential, its still a number assigned to you and as such, it could be argued, is personal information.
I might be barking up the wrong tree but hopefully there's some mileage in the argument.