Nominated for the most classy comment of the month. That the product manager of The Guardian would take the time out from his (no doubt) busy day to help a user to block tracking is an amazing display of trust in that the user knows best what is good for them. Thank you.

It's more like he knows that helping one single user like this isn't going to make a dent in the tracking they do on virtually all other users.

Now, if they voluntarily stopped tracking all or a significant portion of their users, I would be shocked.

Of course, that isn't going to happen.

Of course there is always a way to put a negative slant on just about anything.

I wonder why companies who host their own analytics choose to use a separate request to track users?

Surely it is better just to get the data from your own content web server logs ? Wouldn't you get the same information while saving on the extra HTTP request? It would make the site loading times slightly faster as well.

Server logs will track all requests from crawlers, accelerators, and cancelled navigations. An AJAX callback will only happen for real human visitors that actually view the page.

I admire the fact that you offer this kind of info :-) thanks mate, always admired the Guardian for his articles, authors & general stance towards privacy.

Considering them telling almost 20 other domains about your visit, I would not call that stance on privacy a strong one: 2o7.net, ajax.googleapis.com, chartbeat.com, chartbeat.net, dqwufkbc3sdtr.cloudfront.net, facebook-web-clients.appspot.com, google.com, googleadservices.com, googletagservices.com, imrworldwide.com, mathtag.com, ophan.co.uk, optimizely.com, outbrain.com, scorecardresearch.com, twitter.com, wunderloop.net, www.googleapis.com

nice