Filters unsuitable for EasyList or EasyPrivacy

[Ares2]

UPDATE: Adult sites are now officially covered, acceptable ("harmless") first-party tracking has been mostly defined and readding google-analytics is being considered and tested.

Please refer to our policy to find out about the scope of EasyList and EasyPrivacy: https://easylist.adblockplus.org/en/policy

1. EasyList is targeted to English sites. While as a general ad blocking list it contains lots of filters that block ads on sites of all languages, no filters will be added specifically for non-English sites - EasyList would become too huge and unmaintainable otherwise.

2. Adult websites are not explicitly dealt with in EasyList or EasyPrivacy. If you wish to block adverts on such sites, try Fanboy's Adult/Dating subscription: http://easylist.adblockplus.org/#specialsub.

3. EasyPrivacy does not block 1st-party tracking if it is
a)"harmless" (e.g. a simple visible hitcounter, 1x1 gifs without queries, stuff that can be obtained from the server logs too) or
b) causes script errors (e.g. hbx.js, s_code.js).

4. EasyPrivacy does not block the initial ga.js and urchin.js from google-analytics.com as blocking it causes problems on many sites (potentially every site using it due to the way it is implemented). The "real" tracking (/__utm.gif) is still blocked.

If you don't like the fact that such a widely used 3rd-party tracking script isn't blocked (which is what you probably added EasyPrivacy for ), just add this filter to your personal rules:

Code: Select all

||google-analytics.com^$third-party

As mentioned, this can cause problems on some sites (links not working etc.)!

You can now put up with that (there is even a chance that you never visit such a problematic site or use the broken function/link there) but we've found a way to fix this problems with a Greasemonkey script, see https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic ... 886#p27886

Thanks to Michael who created this sticky first.

[Erunno]

About Google Analytics and the other unblocked scripts:

Google Analytics (from here on abbreviated as GA) is likely the most used tracking software on the Internet right now and the lack of a filter for blocking the google-analytics.com domain has caused some concern among users of EasyPrivacy in the past. To understand what impact the decision to refrain from blocking GA directly has on your Internet privacy, the following circumstances have to be taken into account:

1.) GA does not track you across domains. Each site creates a different unique ID to recognize your Firefox installation.
2.) GA uses first party cookies for tracking. Since all major browsers forbid for security reasons that domain "foo" has access to cookies from domain "bar", GA has to use a trick to transmit the information stored in the cookies of domain "foo" to google-analytics.com for further processing. A Google-provided script on domain "foo" tries to load a small image (called __utm.gif) from Google servers and attaches all relevant information (your user ID, session ID, etc.) as parameters to the image (the part after the '?' character).

EasyPrivacy does block __utm.gif and therefore also the information that is transmitted alongside it. Your browser may store GA-related cookies but without the possibility to load __utm.gif your presence is still hidden from GA.

The other unblocked scripts are also "first party" tracking scripts. They are able to monitor your activity on a specific domain "foo" but not on another domain "bar". The privacy leak therefore is manageable.

[MonztA]

There is now an add-on from Google: Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on (BETA)

To provide website visitors with more choice about how their data is collected by Google Analytics, we have developed the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on. The add-on communicates with the Google Analytics JavaScript (ga.js) to indicate that information about the website visit should not be sent to Google Analytics.

If you want to opt out, download and install the add-on for your current web browser. The Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on is available for Internet Explorer (versions 7 and 8), Google Chrome (4.x and higher), and Mozilla Firefox (3.5 and higher).

You can get it here: http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout?hl=en

[Erunno]

Meh, I was hoping that extension would prevent GA from settings cookies in the first place.

EDIT: Does this thing actually work at all? __utm.gif is still being blocked by EasyPrivacy.

[MonztA]

__utm.gif is still being blocked by EasyPrivacy.

Not for me.

[Erunno]

My bad. As stated, the extension only works for ga.js.

[drkaw]

Does this mean that if GA is down that all of these websites that rely on it will no longer work properly?

[Ares2]

Indeed.