Anonymous usage statistics

[HyperHacker]

I want a program of mine to periodically send some info to a server, telling various things like how often it's used and for how long, as some other programs (such as Winamp) do. Of course people will want this to be anonymous, but I can't think of a good way to make it so. All I really want to know is how many people are using it and how often the average person uses it. I don't need to know how often each individual person uses it. However, if I'm to maintain an accurate count of how many people use it, then when it reports that it's just been installed, I need to know whether it's already been installed once before on that system. (I can't just have it report when it's uninstalled, as this won't happen if the user doesn't use the uninstaller, such as if they format their HD.)

The problem is, the only way I can think of to know if the person installing it has already done so before is to keep track of which systems it's been installed on, identifying them by IP address or some unique ID generated from hardware information. But if I do this, it's no longer anonymous.

[LLXX]

You can't do it without not being anonymous.

Study how spyware works.