Hey Apple,
Saying you block trackers but not blocking Google Analytics is like saying you practice safe sex when you cut off the heads of your condoms.
Sincerely,
A guy who makes an app that actually blocks trackers
@aral Stop it indeed, use https://matomo.org/ instead.
Google analytics doesn't use third party cookies anymore, right?
So what difference with matomo?
@tuxicoman @aral With Google Analytics you share a lot of information with one of the biggest surveillance capitalists in the world. Matomo is free opensource software, your data is your data, not shared with anyone nor used for any other purpose then providing statistics to the website owner.
You can even host Matomo yourself to be absolutely sure your data isn't going anywhere.
@aral confirmed by HTTPArchive Data, as the most proeminent analytics script. https://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js represents 0.64% of all the requests of their dataset. https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2019/third-parties
I'd classify Google's font CDN as a tracker also.
It gets:
* Your IP
* Your user agent
* Date & time of visit
* HTTP Referrer (knows what site you visit)
There's little stopping them from correlating your IP with your Google account, if you used the account from your IP and agreed to their services.
Oh, there's also their DNS server.
Read more on my site: https://danuker.go.ro/how-to-protect-your-personal-data.html
@danuker @borisschapira As would I. But unless developers stop adding Google’s trackers to their web sites, we would break most of the web if we blocked that.
Using uBlock Origin, I block third party requests by default.
I need to make adjustments for few sites, and IceWeasel's (also Firefox's) Reader View unbreaks articles even with off-domain CSS.
@ldexterldesign Vivaldi phones home and to Google every 24 hours, checking for updates.
Here is an exploration of the requests it sends: https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/vivaldi.html
@danuker thanks for referencing this though, I must have missed it in my feed etc.
@aral @danuker @borisschapira decentraleyes?
Decentraleyes barely blocks anything. It seems to work for handpicked resources instead of caching everything on third-party domains.
A user even complains here about fonts and CDNs: https://git.synz.io/Synzvato/decentraleyes/-/issues/34
With uBlock Origin, by default, I block everything except the main server. This breaks many sites, but I can live with that and manage it.
Also, I get rapidly informed of sites that prioritize saving a fraction of bandwidth and/or style over my privacy.
@danuker @aral @borisschapira oh, dang. thanks.
@SoniEx2 @danuker @aral I block everything at the host file level, so that Apps are also prevented to share data with trackers. Blokada on Android, and a script on Mac OS https://boris.schapira.dev/notes/2018-09-one-host-file-to-block-them-all/
Cool! Your approach does cover all apps, but it relies on a big blacklist that needs updating as trackers change domains.
I guess you could also benefit from uBlock Origin and see what 3rd party requests go through unblocked.
@danuker @SoniEx2 @borisschapira And, if you want to, you can use the Better block list with uBlock Origin (but I wouldn’t mix it with others as we go to great pains to try and not break sites while still protecting you/ourselves) :) https://better.fyi/blockerList.txt
@aral nice resource Aral! trying to decrease that number one site at a time with https://plausible.io/
@markosaric @aral Are you aware of any way to integrate Plausible with a site hosted at Adobe Portfolio? Would love that, but no code injection there makes it look like an impossible task.
@markosaric Yeah, that's what I figured... Sad Face Emoji. @aral
@markosaric Looks great, Marko :)
@aral thank you Aral!
@markosaric @aral do you know any pros to using this over matomo?
@nx @aral main differences are:
- more lightweight (we're under 1 KB so no impact on page loading time)
- simple to understand (only tracking few of the most important metrics and not everything possible)
- private out of the box as not using cookies and not tracking any personal data so no need to ask for cookie/GDPR consent
See this https://plausible.io/vs-matomo
@markosaric @aral wow thats great will definitely use this
@aral Thanks to your toots I finally did it and removed GA from my site. Sadly the main photo site is hosted at Adobe Portfolio, so I can't use any other platform. Gone are my stats... 😆
@aral Pfffffffff... Non La Il Sont Pas Serieux, better.fuck La Il Utilise Que Apple Ou Quoi ?!??
@aral Just installed. Thanks for your work!
@aral I use noscript and, yeah I can confirm that many pages use Google Analytics
@aral I was going to advertise for #matomoanalytics but then I realized they became quite pricey since their humble opensource beginnings 🤷♂️
any self hosted analytics software to reccomend ?
@aral To be honest having used GA and Piwik/Matomo for years on several sites; the only real use I've had is to look for old content which is read a lot, to update it or at least archive it and have proper working linkage.
There has never been a moment where I've gone like "Woah, I would have done smth. completely different if I had no insight into the usage analytics"...
@aral Apple doesn’t claim to block google analytics. That is something various news outlets misunderstood and widely misrepresented. what it does is cross site isolation.
@aral what apple claimed to have is “tracking prevention”, and a screen shot showed google analytics was included in that. it will allow ga to load and run, but, the claim is, yiu’ll look unique from site to site.
Google Analytics is the most prevalent tracker in the world. During our last crawl, we found it on 64.2% of web sites:
https://better.fyi/trackers/google-analytics.com/
Developers: every time you add Google Analytics to a site, you are helping build the global panopticon. Stop it!