Block google analytics

Google takes particular and exceptional interest in people with heretical views, as illustrated by the fact that people who post subversive material under their google accounts get special treatment, and special requests for identifying information.

I have reason to believe that google has anomalously little information on me, possibly because of various fairly routine measures I have taken to limit information gathering on me. Perhaps their information collecting tactics are aimed at the low hanging fruit, the ninety nine percent, because gathering information on privacy oriented people is more trouble for less benefit, and likely to produce more bugs, misinformation, and faked identities, relative to the amount of data gathered.  When people are so happy to give away their information, it is perhaps more trouble that it is worth to steal it.

Google analytics, however, steals it.

Most sites you go to link to google analytics, so when you look at a web page on, say, naked nine year old girls, or, even worse, differences between the races and the sexes, your browser executes the ga script file, which is three thousand lines of code, eighteen kilobytes, exercising every security flaw and privacy bug to identify you, and then report to google what you have been doing, that you went to this page, that you went to this page from that other page, and so on and so forth.

So even if the web page on gender differences does not link to google analytics, the next web page you go to may well rat you out, telling google not only where you are at, but where you have been.  And even if  your ideology is as pure from thought crime as the driven snow, executing eighteen kilobytes of javascript code over and over again significantly slows your browser and entire computer.

I use my hosts file to redirect browser requests to google analytics to my local computer, whose local server responds to all such requests with a redirect, that the  page has permanently moved to about:blank, but of course it does not matter how your local server responds, or whether it responds at all, or whether you have a local server at all.  All that matters is that it is redirected to some place that is not google.

I have a very long hosts file, which also blocks most ad related, scam, and tracking sites.   Spybot search and Destroy has a long list of tracking sites, and will add its list to your hosts file, but for some reason, does not list Google Analytics as a spy site or tracking site, possibly because it does not use a Google analytics tracking cookie as such, that being a fairly blatant privacy violation.

However lots of google services have lots of google tracking cookies, including services you were probably entirely unaware of signing up with, so check your cookies, delete the google cookies, and block their servers if the cookies somehow keep mysteriously re-appearing. They steer mighty close to blatant privacy violation.

If you clear all cookies, and not long thereafter see some mystery sites showing up on your cookies list, the mystery sites are probably up to no good. This happens a lot less if you use spybot’s patch to the hosts file.