In their page they say (w/r/t Google Analytics) "you maybe use the anonymization feature. This is a step in the right direction, but the sad reality is Google can still collect all the information" -- you would have to trust them too [Simple Analytics] to not collect, save, or delete-accordingly all the information sent to them.
It is a third party information collector, period. It tracks visits, it tracks pageviews, at minimum. I am not against them as a company or product, but I believe that easyprivacy is 100% correct in blocking their domain.
Therefore I expect my blocker to block a 3rd party tracker which by definition has the capability to track me across websites. It makes that kind of tracking technically infeasible which is the level of protection I want.
I already provide all the necessary data in my request to the first party server. It’s all in the server logs.
End of the day, at least in my opinion, it is acceptable to be added to blocklists, and it is acceptable to not use those blocklists and hit the beacon.
Yes there is. SimpleAnalytics claim that they "don’t track visitors of our customers’ websites".
Are they lying? If not, how is it a tracking script?
Otherwise, why do they need your browser to make a request in the first place?
FWIW I agree with dylz. It is crazy to suggest that any company doing analytics has any sort of right to make my software connect to its servers.
If Easylist did not block all unnecessary requests, I would find a list that did.
No analytics company has a right to make you connect to its servers. But, that isn't the case at all: You visit some website. The operator of that website has contracted with the analytics company. You ask the website for some information and it replies with that information as well as a request to ping the analytics company that the website contracted with. It's apparently "crazy" to comply with that request, all while still consuming the information that you asked for and received.
Ad-blockers wouldn't be controversial if they worked by navigating away from any site that displayed ads or included a tracker. Of course, that would be inconvenient for the user, so, they don't do that. The whole point of an ad-blocker is to allow a user to consume a service in a manner that the entity running and paying for the service didn't intend. We could at least acknowledge that. Your position, however, seems to be that doing what the service you are using is asking you to do in exchange for its information is "crazy" - and that is straight up ridiculous.
A browser is, after all, a user-agent. The web was designed this way for a reason.
Would I be breaking some sort of inferred agreement if I browsed with no Javascript enabled at all?
In any case, a site server logs should provide ample information for analytics, unless they are measuring mouse movements or scrolling etc.
This is a war; a never-ending war of users VS adtech. I realize how much defense I have to run to protect mtself even moderately, and I'm still losing.
Adblockers are not controversial. Stop pushing adtech narrative and passing it off as an established fact. HN is the last place on earth where people would fall for this kind of crap.
The internet was built to decentralise and make information globally available. It wasn't built for some morally bankrupt interest groups to turn a profit. The http protocol is explicitly in favour of user control over content.
Ad blockers are not controversial, even if the ad industry would like them to be.
It's the other way around. The HTTP protocol and supporting web standards were designed from grounds-up to allow and encourage the kind of things an ad-blocker does. The browser acts on behalf of the user (hence the term "user agent"). Links in a HTML response are information, "there is something related over there", not a command "you must go there"[0].
The right way to solve ad-blockers is for sites to comply with the protocol they're operating under - to refuse delivering a resource, with 402 or 403 code, until payment is provided, or an ad is displayed. AKA "the paywall". The controversy only exists because many website operators prefer to be dishonest and manipulative - they post content that they mark as free giveaway, but simultaneously demand compensation. They stir up drama of how ad-blockers are immoral, whereas in reality, blocking ads is "playing by the rules" and it's them who are in violation of human decency.
> Your position, however, seems to be that doing what the service you are using is asking you to do in exchange for its information is "crazy" - and that is straight up ridiculous.
It's not crazy. But it's also not required by any technology, law or custom. Thing is, the service is asking the wrong way. HTTP protocol was created with means for asking to do something. Like, by responding with 402 Payment Required or 403 Forbidden and some instructions on what you want the user to do, instead of responding with 200 OK + content + guilt-tripping popups and pretending to be victim in news articles.
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[0] - Want the "command mode" web? Invent your own, DRMed one. Because otherwise what you're doing is, again, trying to have your cake and eat it too - putting your content on the public web to gain free audience, and then refusing to play by public web's rules.
It's kind of funny that that was, originally, the very definition of "hacking", and we are in a site called "hacker news". But moving on...
The adtech industry got in its head that it can just arrive in a place that already existed (the Internet) and start inventing implicit contracts. It reminds me of the "nice guy" that does some nice gesture for a woman he likes and then gets outraged when the "implicit contract" for sex is not honored.
Hosting is not even that expensive. You know what's expensive? "SEO", buying traffic, in short polluting the very environment where you exist. That is the sort of thing many companies will do with their ad money. They do what they can to place themselves between me and the stuff I want to talk/read about, and then act all outraged when I take counter-measures against their spying and manipulation attempts. That's rich.
I hope EasyList continues to do its job of acting on behalf of the users and does not get swayed by bullshit.
They often bend over though. I don't remember specific one, maybe amp-analytics.google.com. Also removed some anti-adblock thing after DCMA complaint.
You have to use several lists, like uBO does.
"Tracking" has never been very well defined. It just means something like, "collecting data we don't think you should collect."
If you want something more specific, lots of conflicting definitions do exist, but nothing that people can agree on.
A “user tracker” sets cookies and follows a user around, knowing what the user have or have not done before.
A “site tracker” (bad wording I know) follows what happens to a site, what device types accesses it etc.
Sure, making direct requests to the analytics servers exposes IP and possibility to somewhat track the user. Tracking based on IP is pretty inefficient though, due to shared IP-addresses, IP-address changes when jumping between networks, VPN:s.
Ideally SimpleAnalytics would provide a tiny proxy/washing script that one can host on ones own server and which one includes on ones site rather than including it directly from SimpleAnalytics servers. That way one can guarantee ones users that no IP-address is leaked to a third party (which would also make a Data Processing Agreement completely unnecessary from a GDPR perspective)
> " EasyPrivacy [...] including web bugs, tracking scripts and information collectors"
Simpleanalytics is all of the above. There is no arguing this.