google analytics everywhere
Greetings ladies and gentlemen.
Following onpon4 advice, I'm trying not to use javascript on the web to make my browser more secure. In order to keep track of the scripts, I use noScript add-on for Abrowser. I've discovered a thing called "Google analytics" that is spread all over the web like a weed.
I've been doing a little research and I discovered some things, one of them is well summed up by in the wikipedia:
"Google Analytics can track visitors from all referrers, including search engines and social networks, direct visits and referring sites. It also tracks display advertising, pay-per-click networks, email marketing, and digital collateral such as links within PDF documents."
Just for curiosity, I've decided to look for the word google inside google to see the probability a person have of finding the analytics service by chance and I think the answer is 0. It's like hidden from normal people.
It's everywhere, and they track and sell. Is that even legal? Mister Stallman talked about that in a lot of his speeches but now that I see it I'm a little more conscious of what they can do.
What do you think?
I am a translator!
yep. it's everywhere.it is directly feeding the nsa and everybody else willing to pay for that info.. and it's disgusting.
this is how I browse the web - Icecat-noscript set to very strict settings-spyblock + easylist-disconnect- no plugins.
One should also check some about:config entries..
cheers
i use icecat with
JavaScript disabled
ad block edge(libre)
grease monkey(libre) with some libre scripts to watch youtube
https everywhere
and the libre speed dial plug-in(libre mpl)
Try ublock, also libre, much faster, and more blocking ability than AdBlock Edge. :)
https://trisquel.info/en/browser/addons/ublock
Also don't forget link tracking...
https://trisquel.info/en/browser/addons/clean-links
ublock works fine but when i installed clean links it didn’t seem to help
this is the url in my browser:
https://www.google.co.uk/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=zh3jVN_oHob98wfA9oGQDA
BTW i don’t use Google it was just as a example
Oaw, I didn't know about that extensions.
Thank you
A side effect of disabling all these scripts is the added performance of not having to always talk to Google and Facebook.
It is amazing just how pervasive they are on the net, they always turn up in the oddest places.
For companies is google analytics perfect, because the website owner can see everything.
He sees what the user do on his website very good. In many companies there is one employee to work on the website and the employee check the results from analytics and try to improve the website, because it's his work.
I see both sides ...
The user lose all rights but the company get a tool to improve the website from the company and get statics from the user.
But at the end this program is really bad for all user of the world.
If you want statistics, use a local tool.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Free_web_analytics_software
I block Google Analytics with No Script. The fact that it is in a lot of web sites shows us that people in charge of web sites don't care about revealing private information of their users to a monopoly, or don't even think about it. It's similar to people's attitude with unfederated social networks: they don't realize how dangerous it is for the society to give so much power to an entity (Especially Facebook in this case). These monopolies are becoming a second government world-wide. Ostensibly they provide a service to you, but in fact they are only concerned with serving themselves. This also includes proprietary software monopolies. Not that individuals and small companies are any better for their users (reductionistically speaking), but for the society (holistically speaking), they're not so dangerous.
"people in charge of web sites don't care about revealing private information of their users to a monopoly"
i would replace the world all with alot
for example the fsf privacy policy:
https://www.fsf.org/about/free-software-foundation-privacy-policy
"I block Google Analytics with No Script"
why not just disable JavaScript?
>why not just disable JavaScript?
Most of the time I have it disabled, but since I use JavaScript for some pages (For example, in Wikipedia, with JavaScript you can have Media viewer, MathJax (Which I occasionally enable), and for redirect pages, you get the target page URL) I use NoScript with disallow by default instead of disabling it globally.
+1 for µBlock. http://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
You can also use an /etc/hosts file to block Google Analytics.
When you see a site using Google Analytics, contact its owner and tell them to switch to Piwik, a free/libre Web Analytics solution: http://piwik.org/
that piwik thing seems really good :)
I am going to look into that.