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There are some interesting results if you check the Google Analytics ID of TikTok. They seem to also manage a somewhat sizable portfolio of gambling sites, sit

There are some interesting results if you check the Google Analytics ID of TikTok. They seem to also manage a somewhat sizable portfolio of gambling sites, sites selling knockoff Sports Jerseys, and adult videotube sites. I am counting about 45 sites right now for UA-75850242. Many Chinese sites seem to operate like this. I believe Huawei has about 500 completely unrelated sites. A sort of SFW “soft core” example of this would be yoma202.com [1] which is also used to manage huaweimarine.com. Please note that Huawei and Huawei Marine separated about 6 months ago technically. [1] http://yoma202.com http://yoma202.com

greggman2 7y ago
Is it possible they're just sharing source and not changing the id?
ars 7y ago
That doesn't actually mean anything. Every large site will have it's UA number copied by random spammers, often in Russia. I've never figured out the motivation, but I've seen it a number of times.
- rshnotsecure 7y ago
  I think you make a valid point that also is the most plausible argument I’ve heard. Except though if I do this exercise for USA sites, I don’t see the same thing. My guess though is that the USA sites are maybe just more aggressive about filing abuse claims to the registrar?
  - codezero 7y ago
    late to this discussion, but in terms of using Google Analytics, you can whitelist specific domains if someone is copying your UA code and sending your instance data. Most implementations are set up this way from the start so you don't even need to notice someone is attempting to poison your data. One of the reasons this is done is to generate referrer spam, which is a really niche way to get the analysts who are looking at the data in GA to see their ads. I'm sure there are other reasons folks do this, perhaps there's a UA- code factor into PageRank/Google rankings that spammers picked up on, I can think of a lot of other creative reasons. That said, it's pretty curious that there are a lot of sites using it, you might do well to see if you can intercept some mobile app data to see if any other apps are also using the UA tag of TikTok. There are other things you could look at in terms of how they implement the actual tracking in GA, if the tracking calls look pretty similar but aren't just a carbon copy, it could be more intentional.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
zachguo 7y ago
Nah, those are just some crappy sites made from copy-n-pasting source code from everywhere.

greggman2 7y ago

Is it possible they're just sharing source and not changing the id?

ars 7y ago

That doesn't actually mean anything. Every large site will have it's UA number copied by random spammers, often in Russia. I've never figured out the motivation, but I've seen it a number of times.

rshnotsecure 7y ago
I think you make a valid point that also is the most plausible argument I’ve heard. Except though if I do this exercise for USA sites, I don’t see the same thing. My guess though is that the USA sites are maybe just more aggressive about filing abuse claims to the registrar?
- codezero 7y ago
  late to this discussion, but in terms of using Google Analytics, you can whitelist specific domains if someone is copying your UA code and sending your instance data. Most implementations are set up this way from the start so you don't even need to notice someone is attempting to poison your data. One of the reasons this is done is to generate referrer spam, which is a really niche way to get the analysts who are looking at the data in GA to see their ads. I'm sure there are other reasons folks do this, perhaps there's a UA- code factor into PageRank/Google rankings that spammers picked up on, I can think of a lot of other creative reasons. That said, it's pretty curious that there are a lot of sites using it, you might do well to see if you can intercept some mobile app data to see if any other apps are also using the UA tag of TikTok. There are other things you could look at in terms of how they implement the actual tracking in GA, if the tracking calls look pretty similar but aren't just a carbon copy, it could be more intentional.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

zachguo 7y ago

Nah, those are just some crappy sites made from copy-n-pasting source code from everywhere.