UBlock defaults to blocking Google Analytics tracking

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/blob/e6707fe8b155cc92da1cb5e4aad7098b057429cd/assets/thirdparties/easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easyprivacy.txt#L106

by bhouston • 12 years ago

71 88 12 years ago

github.com

bhouston6• 12 years ago

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.

mtmail2• 12 years ago

Google Analytics is already blocked by multiple ad blockers. Sorry, those users don't care if you want use 3rd party tracking software.

johnpowell• 12 years ago

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

dozy3• 12 years ago

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.

nfoz4• 12 years ago

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.

ddebernardy• 12 years ago

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.

Karunamon3• 12 years ago

As mentioned upthread, even a self hosted solution like piwik is blocked by default.

So great to see what we're sacrificing upon the dubious privacy altar...

conphill• 12 years ago

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?

teamhappy2• 12 years ago

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 different jurisdictions) without even considering to ask for my consent. That's not nice, is it?

You could ask me, on first visit, if I'm okay with you sending my (anonymous) data set to Google. It's really not that hard, is it? Just ask. But you don't. Not only does nobody do that, I'm pretty sure most people don't even consider doing it. That's the most offensive part.

So what am I left with? I could stop using the WWW all together, I suppose, or, I could block Google Analytics and the likes before hand, and then, if I feel comfortable doing it, opt in to sharing my data because I like your service and I want it to improve.

You and Google don't ask for my consent, but Ghostery does. That's why I (have to) use it.

---

bhouston said: "This type of stuff should be opt-in." (blocking GA, that is)

I hope the people reading my comment can appreciate the irony.

[By the way, the hypothetical guy I'm yelling at — not you]

---

One hour later. Can't make this up.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/01/healthcare.gov-sends-p...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8920294

kagebe• 12 years ago

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?

satori99• 12 years ago

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?

eli4• 12 years ago

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.

bigbugbag5• 12 years ago

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/

waxjar• 12 years ago

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.

mtmail2• 12 years ago

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

bhouston6• 12 years ago

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 useless.

This type of stuff should be opt-in. Most people install uBlock to remove Ads. But now we are making them invisible to websites at the same time, which is not what most people signed up for.

rmxt2• 12 years ago

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 on your own domain? No external requests, and no information back to Google.

silverwind• 12 years ago

Nothing stops you from doing analysis yourself.

DangerousPie2• 12 years ago

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...

tombrossman2• 12 years ago

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/

thaumaturgy2• 12 years ago

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.

chmars• 12 years ago

Can't you simply use your server logs?

j4kp07• 12 years ago

Sure you can. Quit using Google. You think they are the only with a tool that provides these answers? Also, I think you are wrong: If people understood how FB, Twitter and Google can track your moves across websites, then I believe most WOULD want this.

Animats• 12 years ago

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.

bigbugbag5• 12 years ago

I've used ad blockers since ad started to appears on the web because ads are annoying sure but the real reason is that it is a severe privacy intrusion. This is exactly why I installed µBlock as soon as I heard about it, because contrary to ad blockers it states clearly that it is about privacy and shows that the author actually gets it.

I could not care less about stupid justification for spying on me and sending all this data about me to google, either use piwik or learn to apply analytics to your web server logs.

Anyways I was already invisible to you because I have js disabled by default, and a few extension dedicated to blocking trackers and google spefically, with fanboy's lists to block trackers.

beedogs2• 12 years ago

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.

Sure you can. You can do all of those things still.

phatfish• 12 years ago

If I like a site, and they don't show obnoxious ads I often white-list it. It's up to you convince me.

acheron• 12 years ago

Good. So does Ghostery, for that matter. It'd be a pretty poor blocker if it didn't block one of the biggest trackers out there.

ubercow132• 12 years ago

Thanks, ublock

dozy3• 12 years ago

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.

DangerousPie2• 12 years ago

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

dozy3• 12 years ago

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

Glyptodon• 12 years ago

The smallest violin in the world is playing a tune while I cry crocodile tears.

It's just doing what it's supposed to do.

ArtDev• 12 years ago

Maybe it will balance out all of the false positives from bots? I get so much fake traffic, I don't know the real numbers anyhow.

maxmcd• 12 years ago

Fake traffic? I have access to a few mid/high-traffic sites on GA. We do a lot of event tracking, so unless these are very sophisticated bots I imagine I would pick up on a lot of bot traffic.

Mind expanding on the fake traffic you're getting?

michaelbuckbee• 12 years ago

Here's the most prominent one that's happening now: http://www.incapsula.com/blog/semalt-botnet-spam.html

Basically referrer spam.

gorhill2• 12 years ago

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"

fs111• 12 years ago

That is awesome!

zwetan6• 12 years ago

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

gergles• 12 years ago

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.

bhouston6• 12 years ago

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 stupid but these are not used to run ad-networks, but rather improve the quality of the website you are on.

_f71y• 12 years ago

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?

mercer2• 12 years ago

Are any of these blocked services self-hosted? I sort-of agree with you if that is the case, but otherwise I'd say that it's entirely fair that a user use uBlock to keep these third parties from tracking their behavior.

sergiotapia• 12 years ago

Fantastic, I decided to install this extension and give it a whirl and it works as expected with zero configuration. Loving it!

I appreciate the fact that this is blocking everything about my usage to spying companies/individuals.

bigbugbag5• 12 years ago

So does "no google analytics"[1]. It seems I'll soon be able to replace several extension by µBlock which is a good news.

I've long wished firefox would actually block ads and trackers by default, but it seems they'd rather make money instead.

[1] https://github.com/erikvold/no-ga

beedogs2• 12 years ago

I don't see any problem with this.

edgarvaldes• 12 years ago

Serious: Why are people surprised to find this? I know GA is not ads, but it's tracking. Not the same category, but the same idea.

davidgerard• 12 years ago

Good!

kbart• 12 years ago

Thanks for finally convincing me giving uBlock a try. And for those crying web developers here -- if you respect your visitors, learn how to use server side analysing and profiling without a use of 3rd party tools by companies known to use privacy violations as a part of business model.

irongeek• 12 years ago

Good, this is awesome.

UBlock defaults to blocking Google Analytics tracking

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