WSS

Corrections

Every substantive correction we make to a published article is recorded here, permanently, with the date and what changed.

We do not silently edit and re-date. If the substance of a claim changed, it appears below.

Typos, broken links, and formatting fixes are made without a log entry. Anything that alters what an article asserts is logged.

Found an error? Open an issue at https://ranti.dev or email [email protected]. Corrections from readers are credited by name unless you ask otherwise.

2026

25 July 2026 - First-Party Server Tagging

Article: First-Party Server Tagging: The Case That Survived Google’s Cookie Reversal

Severity: Substantive. The error affected the article’s central technical recommendation.

What we published: That cookies set server-side via the Set-Cookie HTTP header from your own domain are not subject to Safari Intelligent Tracking Prevention’s seven-day cap on cookie lifetime. We stated this without qualification.

What is actually true: The claim is incomplete. Safari 16.4 (April 2023) extended ITP’s heuristics to server-set cookies. A cookie set via Set-Cookie can still be capped at seven days where WebKit classifies the setting server as third-party - triggered in practice by CNAME cloaking, or by the tracking subdomain resolving to an IP range that diverges from the main site’s.

Why it mattered: This was the load-bearing claim of the article. The architecture we recommended placed the collector on a subdomain (metrics.example.com) served by an edge worker. That subdomain will frequently resolve to a different IP range than the origin - which means a reader could have implemented our recommendation exactly as written, observed no error, and still lost the persistent identity the entire migration exists to obtain. The failure would have been silent.

What changed:

  • The claim is now stated with its qualification, and the qualification is explained rather than footnoted.
  • The recommended architecture changed from a subdomain to a same-origin path (example.com/collect), which has no CNAME, no IP divergence, and nothing for ITP’s heuristics to classify.
  • Added a dig check for comparing origin and collector IP ranges.
  • Added the empirical test - set the cookie, wait eight days without visiting, return in Safari, check survival - because WebKit does not document these heuristics precisely and they change between releases.
  • The FAQ answer on this point was rewritten to match.

If you implemented the original version: run the dig comparison in the article. If your collector subdomain and your origin resolve to unrelated IP ranges, move the collector to a path on your primary domain, then verify with the eight-day test. Do not assume the migration is working because events are arriving - arriving events and persistent identity are different things.

How we found it: internal verification pass prior to publication of the article series. The error originated in relying on the pre-2023 behaviour, which was correct when first documented and has since changed. It is a good illustration of why we date claims: this was true, and then it was not.

Before 2026

No corrections logged. This site began publishing in [YEAR].

What counts as a correction

Logged here:

  • A factual claim that was wrong
  • A recommendation that would not work as described
  • A benchmark figure that was wrong, or was published without adequate method
  • An attribution we got wrong or omitted
  • A browser support claim that has become inaccurate and was not caught by scheduled verification

Not logged:

  • Typos, grammar, formatting
  • Broken links repaired
  • Routine verification passes that confirmed existing claims
  • New material added to an article that does not change what it previously asserted

Where a scheduled verification pass updates a support figure or version number that has changed with time, the article’s last verified date moves and no correction is logged - the original claim was accurate when made and dated accordingly. Where verification finds a claim that was wrong at the time of publication, that is a correction and appears here.