# RFC: Proposal for estimating unique Julia clients without tracking

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/rfc-proposal-for-estimating-unique-julia-clients-without-tracking/138027>\
**Category:** General Usage\
**Tags:** statistics, pkg, cryptography, rfc\
**Created:** [July 9, 2026, 9:07am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/rfc-proposal-for-estimating-unique-julia-clients-without-tracking/138027 "2026-07-09T09:07:34Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 3

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**Author:** ![gdalle](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/gdalle/32/27854_2.png) [@gdalle](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/gdalle)\
**Post date:** [July 9, 2026, 10:43am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/rfc-proposal-for-estimating-unique-julia-clients-without-tracking/138027/3 "2026-07-09T10:43:46Z")

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Thanks for working on this! Just wanted to link to two prior topics of interest with respect to Julia user population estimates:

> [@Pkg.jl telemetry should be opt-in](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/pkg-jl-telemetry-should-be-opt-in/42209):
>
> New “[Pkg & Storage protocols](https://github.com/JuliaLang/Pkg.jl/issues/1377)” and an accompanying centralized [service](https://github.com/JuliaPackaging/PkgServer.jl) to host packages have been [merged](https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/commit/e12b054aa02f609037471047d350ffff078c772e) and are present in Julia v1.5.0-rc1. The new Pkg sends telemetry consisting of a [user-specific UUID](https://github.com/JuliaLang/Pkg.jl/pull/1544) and other information to the server, where it is used to count the number of users and other stats. The goal is to answer the question [“How many Julia users are there?”](https://julialang.org/legal/data/) in fundraising. The current protocol is opt-out, meaning that these stats are collected unless a user changes a configuration …

> [@Announcing: package download stats!](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/announcing-package-download-stats/69073):
>
> After some years of getting the package server architecture in place and working (mostly) reliably, @staticfloat and I finally had some time to work on collecting logs into a data warehouse (we’re using [Snowflake](https://www.snowflake.com)) and designing a set of queries over the logs that we can run and publish regularly. The current public aggregated stats are available with the prefix https://julialang-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/public\_outputs/current/ followed by a rollup name and the suffix .csv.gz indicating that all t…

In particular, judging from the second, it seems that HyperLogLog sampling is _already_ being used?

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