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UBlock defaults to blocking Google Analytics tracking

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Re: UBlock defaults to blocking Google Analytics tracking

#61

Post by teamhappy »

Karunamon wrote: post #55
teamhappy wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you expect businesses to get insights into what features users like or dislike in their product? Collect the data you need yourself. If you don't want to do that (it's really easy) then the data can't be that useful/important to you. Another way would be to, you know, ask your users. What bugs me is that people seem to think it's okay to send my data to another company (usually many, in all kinds of differen…

The reason "nobody does that" is because it's a stupid question that only a tiny minority of people actually care about. It's like the EU cookie law, the net result of which is that a handful of websites are required to post obnoxious warnings. Great. Your solution means even more obnoxious warnings internet wide. "Hey, the person running this website wants to see what its users are doing. Allow Y/N?" This is a futur…

Do you really think it's stupid to consider asking a client whether they're okay with you sending their personal data to another company? Just assuming that only a tiny minority of them actually care seems a bit careless.

I don't like the EU cookie law either, but that's a completely different thing. The only thing they do have in common is that they make UX designer's lives a bit harder, but that's really no excuse.

Re: UBlock defaults to blocking Google Analytics tracking

#62

Post by bigbugbag »

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.

What really hurts your website is that you rely on google (or any other dominant third party). What visitor care for is good content. Try checking http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/does-my-web-site-suck/

Re: UBlock defaults to blocking Google Analytics tracking

#63

Post by waxjar »

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.

Your user sessions should be short, preferably. If I take a long time to find what I need, you have a badly designed website (or an uninteresting one).

Unless you're trying to make a time-sink website like imgur, that is.

Re: UBlock defaults to blocking Google Analytics tracking

#64

Post by bigbugbag »

ddebernardy wrote: post #47
nfoz wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you need help to deal with your server logs, hire a professional.

By the time you got large enough to have to worry about scaling an infrastructure to deal with your server logs you should either have grown out of the average joe category or have enough revenue to hire a sysadmin.

Re: UBlock defaults to blocking Google Analytics tracking

#66

Post by thaumaturgy »

rgj wrote: post #40
thaumaturgy wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once upon a time people and web hosting companies knew how to parse access logs into beautiful analytics systems with software like JAWStats ( http://www.jawstats.com/ ). It's really a shame that Google Analytics has become the only way to handle traffic analysis.

Parsing access logs in 2015? Really? You mean those logs that are cluttered with bot traffic and that only have IP addresses instead of real user sessions, and do not contain valuable information about for instance exit pages, banner clicks, page load times, and so on?

Your knowledge of what can be extracted from server logs is a little bit out of date.

Also, server logs are the only tracking system that can't be disabled by visitors.

Re: UBlock defaults to blocking Google Analytics tracking

#67

Post by kybernetikos »

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.

> 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.

You need barely any information to construct a personally identifiable profile. The fact that you as the user of google analytics can't do it says nothing about googles ability to do it.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/09/your-secrets-live...

Re: UBlock defaults to blocking Google Analytics tracking

#68

Post by hackbinary »

Animats wrote: post #52
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…

Sure you can. All you need to manage your site's performance is in your server's log file. There are many free tools for analyzing those logs. If you're getting client-side errors, run a site analyzer to check your site for dead links and such. You don't need Google for any of this.

I suppose I could do this:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=l...

with bing:

http://www.bing.com/search?q=log+analyzer&qs=AS&sk=AS4&pq=lo...

or with duckduckgo:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=log+analyzer

:D

Re: UBlock defaults to blocking Google Analytics tracking

#69

Post by zwetan »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #66
rgj wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parsing access logs in 2015? Really? You mean those logs that are cluttered with bot traffic and that only have IP addresses instead of real user sessions, and do not contain valuable information about for instance exit pages, banner clicks, page load times, and so on?

Your knowledge of what can be extracted from server logs is a little bit out of date. Also, server logs are the only tracking system that can't be disabled by visitors.

nope, there are number of ways to track visitors even when everything is blocked (like ga.js or whatever) and all cookies disabled.

With user-agent header, ip address, etc. you can uniquely identify a user because there is enough entropy, see https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/01/primer-information-the...

and that basically allows you to emulate a session id without cookies and without appending it to the URL

You can also use the cache to know if the user already visited some content or not, explained here http://joshduck.com/blog/2010/01/29/abusing-the-cache-tracki...

And finally, you can use CSS custom styles to know if the user already visited some web sites or not, see spyjax http://davidwalsh.name/ajax-evil-spyjax

granted, the user can disable JS, change the user-agent, but I would argue they are still trackable

Re: UBlock defaults to blocking Google Analytics tracking

#70

Post by zwetan »

dozy wrote: post #19
DangerousPie wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

good point, if you can't even get to the domain, who cares what the file name is.

because you can host locally the javascript file https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1032389?hl=en-GB
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