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UBlock defaults to blocking Google Analytics tracking

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Re: UBlock defaults to blocking Google Analytics tracking

#21

Post by rudolf0 »

eli wrote: post #11
rmxt wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It block self-hosted Piwik by default too!

That seems pretty unreasonable. I can see providing an option for it, but blocking it by default is bordering on paranoid.

Re: UBlock defaults to blocking Google Analytics tracking

#22

Post by DangerousPie »

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…

I don't think this is such a big issue. Only a small minority of people use uBlock. Whatever data you measure on the 90% of your visitors that don't block GA can, most likely, be extrapolated to the remaining 10% as well.

I'm a lot more concerned about the revenue I am losing due to the decrease in ad views/clicks than I am about a slight decrease in GA hits...

Re: UBlock defaults to blocking Google Analytics tracking

#23

Post by conphill »

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.

I agree. I understand that people have issues with being retargeted by ad platforms and hate seeing the same ad follow them around, but I don't really seem any downside to users being tracked by 3rd party platforms like Google Analytics. Platforms like GA, don't track first party information and anonymize who you are with a randomly generated ID. This is the only thing that makes your visit unique from the rest. I don't see any harm in providing that information. How do you expect businesses to get insights into what features users like or dislike in their product? I can easily see users of a tool like this complain about a change in one of their favorite products, but by preventing them from any insights how does the business figure that out?

Re: UBlock defaults to blocking Google Analytics tracking

#24

Post by falcolas »

leeoniya wrote: post #18
eli wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It block self-hosted Piwik by default too!

this is unfortunate. i think anything that's same domain should be allowed through, even 2nd-level might be okay. it's third-party tracking that should be disabled because of cross-domain tracking capability. it's completely unreasonable to expect websites not to do something as simple as tallying unique visitors or recognizing returning customers via cookies/fingerprinting on their own properties.

To be fair, "recognizing returning customers via cookies/fingerprinting" by itself doesn't require JavaScript. It's the tracking of the user's activity once the page has loaded which does.

Re: UBlock defaults to blocking Google Analytics tracking

#25

Post by eli »

silverwind wrote: post #17
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…

Nothing stops you from doing analysis yourself.

uBlock might stop you. It's certainly consistent with their philosophy to block all analytics, even homegrown and not shared across sites.

Re: UBlock defaults to blocking Google Analytics tracking

#27

Post by nfoz »

eli wrote: post #25
silverwind wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing stops you from doing analysis yourself.

uBlock might stop you. It's certainly consistent with their philosophy to block all analytics, even homegrown and not shared across sites.

I think the parent comment is referring to the idea that the web server, by necessity, is aware of a client connection. Webserver logs reveal a lot of information.

Re: UBlock defaults to blocking Google Analytics tracking

#28

Post by eli »

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.

It's unfortunate so many people are downvoting you apparently just because they don't agree. I'm not sure I agree, but you have a totally valid and reasonable point of view.

Re: UBlock defaults to blocking Google Analytics tracking

#29

Post by gorhill »

Yes, but not because of EasyPrivacy. As I found out at one point, EasyPrivacy does not block everything from Google Analytics. [1]

The one that does the job is Peter Lowe's [2]

I wish you would see how convoluted is your suggestion "to let users opt-in to not be tracked by Google Analytics". (paraphrased) [3]

[1] https://www.diffchecker.com/r7v1cq6x

[2] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/blob/master/assets/thirdpa...

[3] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/564

Edit: "being" => "be"

Re: UBlock defaults to blocking Google Analytics tracking

#30

Post by tombrossman »

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…

I think it's a mistake to think that people who visit your site somehow 'owe you' and should permit third-party tracking code from your site to run in their browser. I understand your points about wanting metrics to learn from, but when you bring in a third party all bets are off and individual visitors (like me) will choose not to run that tracking code.

Don't forget there are other ways of achieving what you want too - you can use something simple like GoAccess[0] or even run a Piwik install off your server logs[1] for a nice pretty GUI experience if you prefer.

As more and more people become privacy-conscious I hope you will see this as an opportunity to learn how to do more yourself and outsource less to Google. They don't even give you all the data they collect from site visitors, you are giving them free data for little in return!

[0] http://goaccess.io/ [1] http://piwik.org/log-analytics/

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