Question

There are other topics like this but none of them completely answer my problem.

I’m making a website only accessible for a small group of users. (like one team)
Now they should all have the possibility to go to the website and see information for them personally. And that without having to log in. Simply said: How to recognize a user without Login.

The problem is, those users will access that webpage 99% of time with their phone.
That means they’ll access it trough WiFi OR 3G network making their IP not constant and in my opinion useless to track. Then I thought about the mac address, that’s one thing that stays stable. But internet suggests it’s not send to browser and so “unable to track”.

Questions:

1. Is it really impossible to track a phones mac address or does a backdoor thing exist? (javascript/php/cookie/...). I do not want an app because the phones work on lots of different platforms.

2. Is there any other value or constant that I can use to identify a user without login?

Answer 1

You could login via PHP-parameters,
so the user can save a link like that to his bookmarks:

intranet/login.php?user=vincent&pwhash=8fe4c11451281c094a6578e6ddbf5eed