UBlock defaults to blocking Google Analytics tracking

Post by eli » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 9:31 PM UTC

rmxt wrote: post #8

bhouston wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blocking standard analytics on small websites who do not server ads is being dick. Now I do not know who is using my website. I can not optimize it for longer user sessions, I can not figure out which are the most popular pages, I can not record client-side errors, I can not track caching and page load time. Basically this screws over those want to create good website experiences. Blinding us in this way is pretty us…

I think a fair portion of the people who are consciously blocking GA might think that beaming back a ton of information to the Google mothership is also "being dick," because they don't want ad-tracking profiles to be built for them based on their browsing habits across millions of websites. If you want to balance the desires of your privacy-savvy users and your craving for analytics, why not use Piwik and self-host…

Post by ubercow13 » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 9:34 PM UTC

dozy wrote: post #9

johnpowell wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry about that. But it is more important that Google doesn't store every website I visit to build a better profile of me.

It is against the terms of service of Google analytics to pass any PII such that you can track an event back to any particular person. On top of that, the code for Google Analytics js is available for your review, along with its network requests, such that you can hold them to their word.

Post by nfoz » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 9:35 PM UTC

bhouston wrote: post #2

More here: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/blob/e6707fe8b155cc92da1cb... This screws my efforts to try to optimize my site for increased traffic and to work towards longer user sessions. This hurts my website.

Post by silverwind » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 9:37 PM UTC

bhouston wrote: post #6

mtmail wrote: post #3

If you read https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/#philosophy then that's not surprising at all. Disconnect.me also blocks Google Analytics.

Blocking standard analytics on small websites who do not server ads is being dick. Now I do not know who is using my website. I can not optimize it for longer user sessions, I can not figure out which are the most popular pages, I can not record client-side errors, I can not track caching and page load time. Basically this screws over those want to create good website experiences. Blinding us in this way is pretty us…

Post by dozy » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 9:38 PM UTC

DangerousPie wrote: post #16

dozy wrote: post #12

Little nitpick - the line linked to is /googleanalytics.js, which I believe in most situations will do absolutely nothing. It's the lines referring to "analytics.js" and "ga.js" that actually matter. EDIT: For clarification, analytics.js and ga.js are in indeed listed, as are many other analytics services, bugsnag and kissmetrics to name a few.

The filter that actually blocks it (at least in my installation) is "||google-analytics.com^".