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Someone should make a plugin that actively sends facebook false tracking information along with your own.
by daemonk 12y ago
Someone should make a plugin that actively sends facebook false tracking information along with your own.
- surreal 12y agoI seem to remember a schoolgirl developing a project to do exactly that, a few months ago on HN. Trying to dig it out now, unless anyone else can chime in?
- Omniusaspirer 12y agoNow that's a funny idea. Instead of just opting out you can poison the tracking info pool which basically invalidates any of the data they get even the legitimate stuff.
- zo1 12y agoAnd thereby forcing them to try figure out "who" is creating the poison data, which seems like quite a difficult problem to solve. *Edit:typo.
- malka 12y agoYeah. The data could even be pooled among some users to fuzz the stats even more, the same way some people shuffle their groceries card.
- zvrba 12y agoI was seriously considering to make a browser plugin which would scrape pages for Google Analytics unique IDs, make a local database of them and randomly mix them up. Like this: 0. [page visited] 1. Does the page contain GA tracking ID? no: do nothing yes: add it to the database and replace it with another randomly chosen ID from the database
- BillFranklin 12y agoWould pay for that.
- frabcus 12y agoPlease do this!
- marak830 12y agoHaha thats great. You definatly should. Hell i think i juat found a project to screw around with this weekend!
- tokenizerrr 12y agoWouldn't referral headers give this away? Unless you change those too of course.
- zvrba 12y agoYou seem to have more clue about web development than I do (my only experience with web are Perl/CGI scripts of early 2000s). Can you describe in more detail how google could detect that the GA identifier has been swapped and how to prevent detection?
- tokenizerrr 12y agoI'm by no means an expert, but usually when a web browser makes a request for a resource it includes a referral header which tells the server where it came from. This header is probably sent both to the initial javascript request and to the tracking pixels it requests to send new info to Google. At a first glance I feel like if you change the tracking id, and the referrals, you may have some success messing with their system. But again, not an expert and I could easily be missing something crucial.
- tokenizerrr 12y agoToo late to edit now, but also I would not be suprised if the javascript they use records the url that is visited and reports that back as well.
- prezjordan 12y agoIDs are tightly coupled with domains, no?
- u124556 12y agoI wonder if Google would get them banned if this happened.
- ska 12y agoSounds like a 2014 variant of emacs' "M-x spook", for tracking rather than the NSA