Re:Show HN: Bypassing ad blockers for Google Analytics
by beagle3 on Wednesday February 27, 2019 @07:10AM
(#19262718)
GA surely delivers that data to google, and tries to correlate through a GA specific domain.
Now, they might not provide it to the site owner unless they opt in (to also share it with DoubleClick or whatnot), and they might pinky swear not to use it (though I have never seen that promise myself).
But using GA, a site makes your naive browser send all that data to google. Why would you assume it is not being used? Does it matter if for now it is only directly visible to google?
It's my understanding that GA cookies do not actually do this.
When a site operator turns on demographic reporting in GA (which is optional), it adds Doubleclick cookies in order to provide that information to the site operator. I know because I did this and I had to update my privacy policy to reflect the Doubleclick cookie (GA prompts the site operator to do this).
It seems like people have come to take it on faith that GA, in its default installation, tracks users across all GA and Google properties in order to improve their ad targeting profile. If there is documentation of that, could someone link it for me?
Maybe I'm just out of date, but I don't think GA does that out of the box. In fact GA expressly forbids site operators from pushing any data into GA (via custom variables etc) that would help them identify users.