The big problem with blocking GA altogether is that GA is usually how people who put together websites find out what browsers people are using to browse those websites.
And if you’re about to say “But they can just look at the user agent in access.log!”, sure they can, but those are in logs that are accessed by sysadmins, not people trying to find out how their websites are used. The first thing someone who’s trying to find out how to optimize their website does is go into GA. If they see no Firefox users in GA, then they don’t care about Firefox compatibility. They may even filter it out to prevent bots.
In order to fix the tracking cookies thing we need to do more than block a popular tool for getting website metrics, we need to understand why it’s used and provide alternatives that respect privacy.
The big problem with blocking GA altogether is that GA is usually how people who put together websites find out what browsers people are using to browse those websites.
And if you’re about to say “But they can just look at the user agent in access.log!”, sure they can, but those are in logs that are accessed by sysadmins, not people trying to find out how their websites are used. The first thing someone who’s trying to find out how to optimize their website does is go into GA. If they see no Firefox users in GA, then they don’t care about Firefox compatibility. They may even filter it out to prevent bots.
In order to fix the tracking cookies thing we need to do more than block a popular tool for getting website metrics, we need to understand why it’s used and provide alternatives that respect privacy.