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UBlock defaults to blocking Google Analytics tracking

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Re: UBlock defaults to blocking Google Analytics tracking

#41

Post by kagebe »

conphill wrote: post #23
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 do…

How about asking your customers, instead of stalking them by default?

Even telephone hotlines warn you that the calls may be recorded and give you (at least) a way to opt out. No site ever gave me such an option, but my browser has it - so I'm using it indiscriminately.

If you want my trust, give me an (opt in and later opt out) button, limit your tracking as much as you can (time, do not correlate with others, personal info, etc.) and as much information about your tracking as you can and what you use it for. In fact, give me an easy way to see what you have profiled and give me an option to clea(n/r) it.

I guess that sounds like hard work. Maybe Piwik can be extended to provide such things? Does it already do some of that?

Re: UBlock defaults to blocking Google Analytics tracking

#42

Post by zwetan »

it is pretty easy to unblock

  1. host the analytic js on your own domain
  2. and/or rename it
at the very worst you can do the analytic tracking server side, I know that because I had to do it to track RESTful API usage as json/xml can not allow you to embed the ga.js

eg.

  1. read a _ga cookie, if it does not exists create it
  2. not fan of it but you can make it more persistent with a session (I know, opposite to the idea of stateless with REST)
  3. and use the measurement protocol (universal analytics) server side which is trivial to implement
here an example in PHP http://pastebin.com/PQCRcJXq

Re: UBlock defaults to blocking Google Analytics tracking

#43

Post by satori99 »

conphill wrote: post #23
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 do…

> 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.

But thats not your call to make for your users if they happen to have a different opinion on the topic.

Google is an advertising company. It is not unreasonable to not want to tracked at all by advertising companies. Neither they nor you have any sort of right to this information.

It sucks for you that it is harder to grow your business. But since when has that ever been easy?

Re: UBlock defaults to blocking Google Analytics tracking

#44

Post by vfclists »

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!

The Piwik block comes from the AdBlock ruleset.

It blocks the piwik.js. When you check the statistics and hover the red filter symbol for the Piwik line you will see which rule blocked it.

Re: UBlock defaults to blocking Google Analytics tracking

#45

Post by Moru »

DangerousPie wrote: post #22
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 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...

Most small adverticers see it the opposite way. We don't want to pay you money to show the ads to someone that is not interested in our products anyway and never will click the link. Or even worse, click the link just to support you, stealing money from us instead. There are always two sides to a coin.

Re: UBlock defaults to blocking Google Analytics tracking

#46

Post by gojomo »

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.

The section about "personally identifiable" information in the Google Analytics Terms of Service [1] does not limit Google, but the site using GA.

Practically, I'm not sure that can even be enforced, or that Google has any incentive to enforce it. If a site uniquely tags each user via custom variables, or by sending users to a unique resource/goal/interim URL, will Google detect this and obscure/destroy the resulting data? Or is such tracking for the site's own purposes a core feature of GA?

And Google often has its own PII about the same user, from other visits to Google's own sites, anyway.

[1] http://www.google.com/analytics/terms/us.html - section 7 "Privacy"

Re: UBlock defaults to blocking Google Analytics tracking

#47

Post by ddebernardy »

nfoz wrote: post #15
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.

Google's spying hurts your users. To manage your webserver, use your server logs. If you really think you need more information than those convey, you could get some self-hosted javascript to assist with that. You need nothing else.

> Use your server logs.

That's hardly useful though. Logs are littered with bot traffic, and several users or sessions can be hiding behind a single IP address. Also, you've absolutely no means to track segments of traffic.

Self-hosted javascript is an only vaguely better option. You then need to worry about the infrastructure needed to write the data in a reasonably scalable way as you get larger, and processing the data in a useful manner isn't necessarily something an average Joe can do.

Re: UBlock defaults to blocking Google Analytics tracking

#48

Post by gergles »

The Panopticon approach of "I am entitled to everything about you and your browsing activity because I technically CAN get it" is very troublesome and I'm glad that µblock takes a small step to revert that.

If some guy followed you around a store with a clipboard literally writing down microsecond-level details of your time spent in the store, you wouldn't be OK with that just because "I promise I didn't write down your name!" There's no reason to suffer LESS privacy online.

Re: UBlock defaults to blocking Google Analytics tracking

#50

Post by Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd »

eli wrote: post #31
nfoz wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That might be useful for fingerprinting visitors but, perhaps ironically, it's much worse than javascript & cookies for actually seeing big picture trends on your site. There are many, many bots that request files off your server but only a relative handful execute javascript.

How many of the bots that don't execute JavaScript bother to download the URLs referenced in tags? You can filter all the others easily.
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