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It's a little sad to watch someone jump through hoops to try to please the people behind EasyList, when I sure don't see anything about country-of-hosting in Ea

It's a little sad to watch someone jump through hoops to try to please the people behind EasyList, when I sure don't see anything about country-of-hosting in EasyList's policies. Especially when almost nobody actually cares about the other members of the Five Eyes or the Enemies of the Internet in these discussions, but just knee-jerks about US hosting.

dylz 8y ago
Yes. Easylist/EasyPrivacy here is intended to block ANY third party tracker. This is a tracker. I use this adblock list and I don't care what country you're hosted in, simpleanalytics is a third party tracker and should be blocked. > " EasyPrivacy [...] including web bugs, tracking scripts and information collectors" Simpleanalytics is all of the above. There is no arguing this.
- skrebbel 8y ago
  > There is no arguing this. 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?
  - satori99 8y ago
    I guess they mean that they aggregate data? rather than storing it for individuals users? 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.
    - dagenix 8y ago
      > It is crazy to suggest that any company doing analytics has any sort of right to make my software connect to its servers. 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.
      - satori99 8y ago
        I understand your viewpoint, but I consider all script tags that a server provides to be merely suggestions. 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.
        crankylinuxuser 8y ago
        Just wait until that official DRM crap is used for adtech and preventing you from modifying the HTML the server sends. 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.
      - TelmoMenezes 8y ago
        > 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. 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.
        auslander 8y ago
        > 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.
  - tylerl 8y ago
    They can both be right. "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.
  - auslander 8y ago
    It is a 3rd party collecting data about my browsing history. Give me one reason why I should not block it, please.
  - tinus_hn 8y ago
    They don’t track customers, and they respect ‘do not track’. One of these must be wrong.
- dagenix 8y ago
  I know very little about SimpleanAlytics. However, they do claim to not be a tracker: https://simpleanalytics.io/no-tracking https://simpleanalytics.io/no-tracking. So, they at the least, would argue one of your claims - do you have evidence that what they are saying incorrect?
  - dylz 8y ago
    By definition, loading it will send your (regardless of whether or not they save this or associate it permanently on their end) coarse location via IP, OS, CPU architecture, browser and via user agent, referrer, execute code on your machine, pages you visit. 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.
    - dagenix 8y ago
      I think its a big mistake to lump this type of "tracking" in with more involved "tracking" where particular users are followed around from site to site to serve up ads based on what the user has looked at recently. These are massively different things. Maybe you are opposed to both types of tracking - I dunno. Personally, I have no issue with a website keeping track of the things that they claim to keep track of (https://simpleanalytics.io/what-we-collect https://simpleanalytics.io/what-we-collect). However, when tracking means that a user does a search for something like "maternity" on one site and then starts getting ads for baby diapers on another - that feels like something that I understand why someone would want to avoid.
      - dylz 8y ago
        Sure - I see nothing wrong with separating out the categories. There are different types and different levels. 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.
- VoxPelli 8y ago
  I think it would be useful to differentiate between “user trackers” and something like a “site tracker”. 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)
abc-xyz 8y ago
I think it's unfair to assume he's jumping through hoops to try to please EasyList when you could just as well assume that someone from EasyList highlighted an issue worth dealing with, even if he knew that there was 0% chance SimpleAnalytics would ever be whitelisted.

dylz 8y ago

Yes. Easylist/EasyPrivacy here is intended to block ANY third party tracker. This is a tracker. I use this adblock list and I don't care what country you're hosted in, simpleanalytics is a third party tracker and should be blocked. > " EasyPrivacy [...] including web bugs, tracking scripts and information collectors" Simpleanalytics is all of the above. There is no arguing this.

skrebbel 8y ago
> There is no arguing this. 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?
- satori99 8y ago
  I guess they mean that they aggregate data? rather than storing it for individuals users? 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.
  - dagenix 8y ago
    > It is crazy to suggest that any company doing analytics has any sort of right to make my software connect to its servers. 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.
    - satori99 8y ago
      I understand your viewpoint, but I consider all script tags that a server provides to be merely suggestions. 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.
      - crankylinuxuser 8y ago
        Just wait until that official DRM crap is used for adtech and preventing you from modifying the HTML the server sends. 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.
    - TelmoMenezes 8y ago
      > 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. 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.
      - auslander 8y ago
        > 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.
- tylerl 8y ago
  They can both be right. "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.
- auslander 8y ago
  It is a 3rd party collecting data about my browsing history. Give me one reason why I should not block it, please.
- tinus_hn 8y ago
  They don’t track customers, and they respect ‘do not track’. One of these must be wrong.
dagenix 8y ago
I know very little about SimpleanAlytics. However, they do claim to not be a tracker: https://simpleanalytics.io/no-tracking https://simpleanalytics.io/no-tracking. So, they at the least, would argue one of your claims - do you have evidence that what they are saying incorrect?
- dylz 8y ago
  By definition, loading it will send your (regardless of whether or not they save this or associate it permanently on their end) coarse location via IP, OS, CPU architecture, browser and via user agent, referrer, execute code on your machine, pages you visit. 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.
  - dagenix 8y ago
    I think its a big mistake to lump this type of "tracking" in with more involved "tracking" where particular users are followed around from site to site to serve up ads based on what the user has looked at recently. These are massively different things. Maybe you are opposed to both types of tracking - I dunno. Personally, I have no issue with a website keeping track of the things that they claim to keep track of (https://simpleanalytics.io/what-we-collect https://simpleanalytics.io/what-we-collect). However, when tracking means that a user does a search for something like "maternity" on one site and then starts getting ads for baby diapers on another - that feels like something that I understand why someone would want to avoid.
    - dylz 8y ago
      Sure - I see nothing wrong with separating out the categories. There are different types and different levels. 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.
VoxPelli 8y ago
I think it would be useful to differentiate between “user trackers” and something like a “site tracker”. 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)

abc-xyz 8y ago

I think it's unfair to assume he's jumping through hoops to try to please EasyList when you could just as well assume that someone from EasyList highlighted an issue worth dealing with, even if he knew that there was 0% chance SimpleAnalytics would ever be whitelisted.