71–80 of 90 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That seems pretty unreasonable. I can see providing an option for it, but blocking it by default is bordering on paranoid.
Well, take it to the easyprivacy guys, µBlock only has their list enabled by default.
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 y…
This is a stupid policy that hurts independent website developers because now I have to write my own version of these tools because if I use third-party services they will be listed in uBlock and blocked by default.
It is stupid but these are not used to run ad-networks, but rather improve the quality of the website you are on.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think you and I have different definitions of personal data. When I hear that phrase, I think things like addresses, income, contacts, and so forth, but not email or phone numbers (both of which are basically public info), and certainly not what you clicked on my site.
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 y…
uBlock's philosophy is to, by default, block crash reporters (bugsnag, newrelic) and all forms of analytics (customer.io, optimizely, kissmetrics, mixpanel, newrelic, pingdom, piwik) because it can. This is a stupid policy that hurts independent website developers because now I have to write my own version of these tools because if I use third-party services they will be listed in uBlock and blocked by default. It is…
Does missing out on the few people who use these tools actually have a meaningful effect on your ability to run your business?
I understand how the crash reporters help you but do you really need Optimizely/Analytics/MixPanel etc. running on 100% of your client browsers?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
There is no way a single sysadmin (how good he think he is) could write the code required for the analytics of a high volume web site (eg. ranked in the top 1000).
Also, without analytics right from the start, I can guarantee you, your web site will never grow, at least certainly not to a high volume web site.
And here the thing that do happen when your web site have a high volume (you know, in real life and not on a fantasy island), even if you reduce your analytics sampling to 10% your web site traffic can still be bigger than the maximum allowed "for free".
So you decide "let's write our own solution" and you assign it to a team of about 5 devs and it take them a good 6 months to finally be able to track data, and then your pointy hairy boss realise he has no nice visual way to read this data (because he want basically the same thing as google analytics).
so tell me again why I/we should not use ga again ?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Most browsers are now taking steps to stop the CSS custom styles hack working - for example this doesn't work in Chrome anymore. The website can show you which websites you've visited with the change in colour for the link state however it can no lonqer query it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
uBlock's philosophy is to, by default, block crash reporters (bugsnag, newrelic) and all forms of analytics (customer.io, optimizely, kissmetrics, mixpanel, newrelic, pingdom, piwik) because it can. This is a stupid policy that hurts independent website developers because now I have to write my own version of these tools because if I use third-party services they will be listed in uBlock and blocked by default. It is…
You could always respect your users and continue using Google Analytics etc. knowing that some of your users won't be tracked. Does missing out on the few people who use these tools actually have a meaningful effect on your ability to run your business? I understand how the crash reporters help you but do you really need Optimizely/Analytics/MixPanel etc. running on 100% of your client browsers?
ublock isn't Ghostery or NoScript. It is being sold to most has an ad blocker, but really it blocks everything.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could always respect your users and continue using Google Analytics etc. knowing that some of your users won't be tracked. Does missing out on the few people who use these tools actually have a meaningful effect on your ability to run your business? I understand how the crash reporters help you but do you really need Optimizely/Analytics/MixPanel etc. running on 100% of your client browsers?
uBlock is going to become very very popular. It isn't just going to be a small percentage of users. It is going to be the majority of tech savvy users. That is the problem. ublock isn't Ghostery or NoScript. It is being sold to most has an ad blocker, but really it blocks everything.
IF you want to track my data you should be asking me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
There isn't always enough entropy to uniquely identify a user - you can't rely on that to provide accurate tracking. If people are coming from a corporate environment using terminal servers then every single browser will identify as one user by that method. Most browsers are now taking steps to stop the CSS custom styles hack working - for example this doesn't work in Chrome anymore. The website can show you which we…
that's my whole point: "yadda yadda yadda ublock or adblock or whatever block ga.js on the client side haha you can not track the visitors anymore"
nope I can still track them and I don't need to even bother analysing the server logs
server side:
1. I can detect if there is a _ga cookie
2. if not, I can generate a UUID based on the user-agent and IP
3. and I send my pageview from the server side
> "There isn't always enough entropy to uniquely identify a user"
there is, read the EFF link it explains all that nicely
TL;DR
- you can not send tracking client side anymore
- OK, I can send tracking server side, go ahead try to ublock that