Browser extension that strips Google Analytics tokens from URL query strings
github.com
github.com
UTMs offer a transparent, honest way of tracking where a user is coming from. This is super important for any company that runs multiple channel marketing.
Making impossible for company to track their marketing effort doesn't protect your privacy. It just makes it tougher for companies to manage their marketing spending.
Marketing is not evil. It's how the world works. You need to market something to be able to sell it.
I feel there is a paranoia about being tracked and privacy, where anything that is somehow tracking, is evil and must be stopped.
UTMs parameters are absolutely harmless and stripping them away offer no privacy benefit whatsoever.
I just hate
a) having ugly URLs
b) having to manually edit the URLS before copy/pasting them somewhere else.
Many sites nowadays actually have thoughtfully designed URL schemes. But then there's so often this GA crap that destroys the esthetics.
As an example, the URL that triggered me to go find this particular extension was:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2018/...
(hex chars randomly manipulated for paranoid reasons, hehe.)
Its not all about privacy and conspiracy, some of us are just trying to avoid burnout.
... from UTM tags?
I'm not sure how UTM Tags contribute to the modern overload of information competing for your attention.
Tracking of all kinds aren't inherently evil. If companies didn't abuse the various ways they tell us are "how the world works", then nobody would ever have needed tracking or ad blockers.
Reality is that no matter how often marketing departments tell us that marketing is vital to the future of the species, people are generally running pretty short on goodwill in these areas. The responsible actors, if there are any, are swimming in a poisoned pond.
Just to pile on a bit, folks who honestly believe in this line of thought should embrace that cliche about marketing being a conversation.
Think about how you reacted to the last intrusive, nosey person you had to deal with. "No, I don't discuss my sex life or my wallet with someone I met in line at the coffee shop."
I totally understand that metrics are needed to evaluate your plans. Problem is, there is a gradient of behavior your team as a whole gets up to, you don't like to talk about the things you do, and the far end of that gradient is some really smelly, nasty behavior.
So in turn, my problem is I'd be fine with a certain degree of tracking, but I don't know exactly where the bad behavior starts. Once data leaks, it doesn't go away. So all of my decent moves involve overshooting and suppressing tracking I'd be OK with, just to be sure.
I don't know a way out of this trap, sorry.
Getting back to marketing-as-conversation, remember the rebellion over ad-popups? Yeah, that was a big moment of going so far the browser makers slapped you down. We heard all the same wailing, and yet somehow civilization survived. I'm pretty sure you can survive me refusing to allow you canvas-fingerprinting, or unlimited rights to run JS on my machine. Or even Urchin-tag-strippers.
I don't think there is one, personally. All the goodwill is gone, and that's extremely difficult to get back.
I think what's important at this stage is that we pay attention to what has happened, with users completely losing trust and faith in advertising, marketing, tracking - heck, even _diagnostic analytics_ - and recognise what caused this.
Then, maybe, we can try and avoid it in future.
Alternatively: Move everything to locked down mobile platforms and keep driving straight towards the latest stage capitalism we can see, and just keep finding new ways to keep users locked in to a platform they despise more and more until something _snaps_ - but that'd be tomorrow's problem, right?
"utm_source, utm_medium, utm_term, utm_content, utm_campaign, utm_reader, utm_place, utm_userid, utm_cid, utm_name, utm_pubreferrer, utm_swu, utm_viz_id, ga_source, ga_medium, ga_term, ga_content, ga_campaign, ga_place, yclid, _openstat, fb_action_ids, fb_action_types, fb_ref, fb_source, action_object_map, action_type_map, action_ref_map, gs_l, pd_rd_r@amazon., pd_rd_w@amazon., pd_rd_wg@amazon., _encoding@amazon., psc@amazon., ved@google., ei@google., sei@google., gws_rd@google., cvid@bing.com, form@bing.com, sk@bing.com, sp@bing.com, sc@bing.com, qs@bing.com, pq@bing.com, feature@youtube.com, gclid@youtube.com, kw@youtube.com, $/ref@amazon., _hsenc, mkt_tok, hmb_campaign, hmb_medium, hmb_source"
Regarding overshooting, try with this: https://adnauseam.io/
"As online advertising becomes ever more ubiquitous and unsanctioned, AdNauseam works to complete the cycle by automating Ad clicks universally and blindly on behalf of its users. Built atop uBlock Origin, AdNauseam quietly clicks on every blocked ad, registering a visit on ad networks' databases. As the collected data gathered shows an omnivorous click-stream, user tracking, targeting and surveillance become futile."
:P
It is lying on a massive scale.
If I want something I’ m go to look for it not the other way around.
If you track me I will dispise you and will root you out. Sort of /r
And how are you going to find it? And how will you know that it's the right solution to what you need? And how will you compare it against other alternatives?
Marketing is about all these things--not just advertising.
I'd trust a mechanic's opinion on what tools to buy much more than a tool company marketing department. I'd expect this type of thinking (being sceptical of "marketing") is pretty much common sense these days.
Since when has marketing EVER given you an honest outlook of these two questions? If you listen to the marketing of a product or service and make your judgement solely on that, then I have a bridge to sell
I'm no fan of invasive tracking or obnoxious sales techniques either, but marketing does serve an objectively useful purpose, as any small business owner will tell you. Demanding to do away with it entirely is just throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
I'm not asking independent third parties to do anything. I'm asking companies to let me do what a Free market is supposed to let me do: Let me make my own educated choices about what I purchase/use, untarnished by psychological tricks and manipulation and tracking.
I'm not defending shady tactics here, I'm being realistic about the functionality marketing provides despite the bad stuff. I get the annoyance, but there's no need to be calling all of marketing "evil" when the free market seems to still be working as it should. When a critical mass of consumers begin blocking all tracking utilities, businesses are going be forced to innovate around it one way or another anyway, and you'll get what you want. It may take a while for that to happen, but that's not a reason to be angry at marketing as a whole. Just continue voting with your wallet (or browser extensions in this case).
EDIT: really, downvotes? I don't even think we disagree, but whatever man. I wish I could be surprised at HN downvoting people trying to be calm and rational instead of emotional and hyperbolic, but that's just cliche at this point. I try to avoid commenting on controversial topics for this reason, but I guess I'll have to add "marketing" to my blacklist of topics as well now.
What is marketing? Your local farmer's co-op overproduced corn and is having a sale, they want everyone to know.
How do they tell you? Run an ad! But ads are marketing. This means they are lying?
Your perception of marketing seems really narrow and confused.
Using "evil" like the upstream comments is a bit strong imo, but it's certainly not known for being a particularly "honest" industry.
Saying "marketing is evil" in the context of a comment thread about GA stripping, replying to someone defending a specific brand of tracking-marketing, can reasonably be taken to refer to that variety of marketing: the contextually salient variety of marketing, which this submission and the current thread are about.
Motte 1: Marketing is valuable and helps people spread information. Bailey 1: Tracking your every move against your will is fine and also profitable.
Motte 2: Tracking my every move is unacceptable and evil. Bailey 2: All marketing - even writing a blog post or website copy about products or approaches to problem solving - is inherently evil.
I don't know which you were referring to, and I kind of like it this way.
'marketing is evil' meaning 'tracking based retargeting is evil' is not.
> 'marketing is evil'
as
> 'marketing, in general, is evil'
is "moving the goalposts".
But I'd suggest you're putting a spin of your own on things here.
Maybe that's worth reflecting on? To me, it seemed pretty straightforward that they were referring to marketing as it was being referred to in the post, comments, and link that we're ostensibly discussing.
I am a digital advertiser that works direct with large and small clients. I use UTMs on every ad campaign I run.
Everything we do to hurt these big companies in online advertising also hurts the small ones. They all use the same technologies.
[1] https://boingboing.net/2007/01/20/big-factory-pig-farm.html
[2] http://www.psychologist-license.com/articles/marketing-psych...
And there was further explanation.
"Marketing" spans a very large area of activity. At one end, it's the signage in front of a store, or even on the door, that tells you what the place is.
You probably aren't trying to insinuate that store signage (or the online equivalent, a domain name), is evil, but that's essentially what you're saying by being so broad. That doesn't help the argument, doesn't help you, and doesn't result in useful discussion, so it's probably worth being a bit more concise.
Not only is it not evil, it's a targeted ad! You were _tracked_ to produce that ad!
In reality, that isn't how a good 90% of marketing really works. Instead, you got an unsolicited letter about widget 1 from a different company who bought your data from FooCorp, and widget 1 doesn't even do what you want, and because you don't buy it they sell your data to even more unscrupulous companies to get some return from their purchase.
I think it's important to recognise, though, that this didn't happen because marketing is evil. If everybody had just stuck to ethical forms of marketing then everyone would be better off, and we wouldn't need extensions like this which do screw things up for the people trying to be ethical.
It's just like ads: You can do ads well, and we _didn't_, and now good ads need to be thrown in the trash alongside everything else. The next thing we try and do we should _remember_ these common stories, and maybe next time we can be a bit more ethical and not poison our own well.
There's a big difference between the random online e-shop and the downtown storefront, or even big names like McDonalds. Many places are only successful because they've established a good, or at least reliable, reputation and people know what to expect.
While targetted ads should technically alleviate this annoyance, in reality it doesn't really work as well as advertised (pardon the pun).
Not so easy when it's a company selling their CRM DB to another company with no notice and no recourse. Or the spammers and call spoofers and... and...
Do we stop buying everything everywhere until backdoor data brokers are all revealed and shut down? All the tracking shops too? How do we get control of the rest of the iceberg?
On the other hand, if I'm actively trying to buy something, then I'll appreciate you telling me what you're selling.
If I'm in a bike shop, it's because I want to buy a bike. The shop doesn't need to know where I was earlier. If you as a seller want to know more about your (potential) customers, maybe… ask them?
It's the other 99% that tries to suck all the information they can out of anyone they come in contact with, they need to go.
This may be true in theory, but in practice countless examples are showing us—in news story after news story about company behaviours—that this is just not true in practice. Which is what counts.
If you can come up with a way to regulate and/or discern those doing "evil" marketing from those doing benign marketing, please do. Until then, unless we can discern, marketing is effectively "evil".
Also, it's not "paranoia" when you are being tracked. And while there's not much you can do, there's no reason to not do little things you can.
These parameters make the choice for me. They have no benefit for me but block my right to determine what I want to give away.
You do not have a right to track me. As for these parameters being harmless to my privacy, I will be the judge of that. In my opinion everything that allows you to see something about me harms my privacy, so not allowing you to see it benefits my privacy. It’s just a matter of how much I allow you to harm my privacy.
Podcasting's zero-telemetry "just an audio file" nature makes the ads feel harmless too. Podcasts are an anachronism, but they're way less user-hostile than the web.
If marketing company derive value off of tracking a user then yes there clearly is a privacy value of stripping UTM from a url. You needn't be that creative to think of an example.
client: "Hi I'd like to see what sort of flights you have available."
"Hmm ok I see that you're linked to us from WealthyPeople.com, guess I'll mark up your ticket price"
There are certainly are markets that open up when users allow themselves to be tracked but allowing users to consent to being surveilled is a fundamental right.
The right to privacy is the right to be left alone.
Acting like this is a losing battle makes such a foregone conclusion. Marketing is like 0.0001% of the population its ok for the rest of us to disagree and regulate them to the degree required to ensure our continued wellbeing even if this means regulating them virtually out of existence.
That makes it an absolute priority to cut "you" off at the knees and make your goal impossible, as you have just told us you are scum and need to be cleansed from the world.
Prove otherwise and we can consider allowing you back in the pool with the people who know how to respect others.
Yes it does.
I don't plan on using this extension, though, because I block all of the Google Analytics javascript files.
I don't care at all about the tracking aspect of removing UTM, I care about how it makes the internet shittier to use.
This spells out the issues really well (with a funny video) https://wistia.com/blog/fresh-url The suggested solution on there "Fresh URL" is interesting, although it's throwing more javascript at the problem.
World's tiniest violin, dude.
Someone can prefer the world be a different way while still participating in it as is.
Unethical marketing behavior is never going to be the make or break point for a company, it's just plain greed showing through.
1) I don't have a choice, since everyone does it; 2) many types of marketing are just fine; 3) if everyone stopped doing this kind of tracking, it's not like the businesses would fail.
Frankly, that's not my problem. I don't know what they're tracking and why, but I'll err on the side of not being tracked, however harmless it may appear.
What I really want is an extension that somehow corrupts the UTM data so that the trackers have bad data.
Now, the scientist is probably right, the hippo probably goes its whole life not really knowing that it has all these leeches in its butt. It might feel a little pain in the butt, but the hippo probably isn't concerned with why that pain is there, much less how or even if it can get rid of it, it's just something that the hippo has always lived with. The hippo accepts that one of the facts of daily life is that you just need to live with some pain in your butt.
Now, imagine (and believe me, this is a hypothetical), if the hippo let someone root around inside its butt and remove every one of the leeches, and even stop any others from attaching. It might take a day or two to get used to and get back to normal, but the hippo would wake up one day and realize that it no longer has a pain in its butt. It can still do everything it used to do, it can frolic in the water, it can roam around and find the tender little pieces of grass, it can do that thing where it poops and swishes its tail around to spread it all over its neighbors, and it realizes that it can do all of those things it likes without having that pain in its butt.
Now, maybe the leeches could talk. Maybe the leeches talk to the hippos and they say things like, listen, hippo, my life cycle depends on you letting me get into your butt when you're in the water. I need to drink your blood and drop out some eggs, so that other leeches can be born and start the cycle all over again. It's not really a big price you pay, I mean sure, there's a little pain in your butt, but I need you to do this. If you want to get in the water, it's just something you have to deal with. It's the price of admission. If you get in the water without letting me in your butt, it's like you're stealing the water.
I bet that the hippo would hear that, and would still want to continue going about its day without any pain in its butt. I don't think the hippo would feel very sorry for the butt leech. Sure, maybe the butt leech contributes to the aquatic ecosystem, maybe its eggs or the dead leeches get eaten by other things and fertilize the grass that the hippo likes to eat. But, if the leeches weren't there, the grass would just find other nutrients. Even though the leech is trying to argue that it's a necessary part of this ecosystem, it's actually just a pain in the butt. In reality, despite what it tells everyone else, the major beneficiary of anything that the butt leech does is the actual butt leech.
Anyway, I just had a thought that advertisers kind of sound like hippo butt leeches.
--amicusNYCLI don’t give a damn if stripping garbage out of urls makes it harder for a company to track me. Why should I?
The extent of my obligation to J. Random Web Business, vis à vis my interactions with them, is to give them their asking price in exchange for their product or service offerings which I consume.
Ad absurdum: imagine if a restaurant could charge you more for food if they knew how hungry you were, or how badly you needed to go to the bathroom. This is not information they need to possess.
Reddit immediately redirects to hide these parameters. Definitely not transparent.
Transparent would be: you're aware about the tracking before it can happen
Thank you for the offer, but I need no tracking of my movements.
> Marketing is not evil.
It is evil. Every time I search for info, I need to filter out all the marketing bullshit from google results. All marketing is a lie or at least a manipulation with one goal to make me buy something that I wouldn't buy otherwise.
So I will do all I can to make life of marketers harder. I just hate them for all their informational white noise in the Internet.
Perhaps he or Pinterest has a need for this.
Outside of the browser, I routinely work with urls in bulk and strip them of unnecessary cruft to make them as short as possible and thus easier for me to store and manage. Cruft attached to urls for tracking purposes serves me no purpose and makes for longer urls and potentially more special characters like ampersands to worry about escaping or encoding. This add-on cruft is not necessary to retrieve the resource identified by the url.
It is totally not important to me or anyone I want to give a URL to.
I can request information about products that I might be interested in. The nice thing about this is that I can request it from a source that I consider to be objective, in the context of alternatives.
Moreover, I think you would probably consider it evil if a tech review service were receiving money under the table from say, Intel, to say that their products were better than their competition. Why should I be forced to allow Intel to make those claims directly through injected javascript or whatever?
Advertising from the source is intrinsically dishonest.
And I think there is a cognitive gap in your argument: I am a user, I am not a company, I am not trying to sell anything to anyone. So why should I be empathic towards marketing? Ads, marketing and tracking does zero, if not negative, good to me. And that is why I will have ad blockers enabled at all time.
> Marketing is not evil
Whether it's evil or not doesn't concern me. I just really don't like them.
> UTMs parameters are absolutely harmless and stripping them away offer no privacy benefit whatsoever.
Again, care to explain why is there not privacy benefit?
GA does not provide any individually identifiable info to its users.
Stripping the params does not prevent google from tracking you internally.
So I am not sure what this is trying to accomplish.
So why do we have to justify anything to corporations? Why should we care if they lose some millions marketing to the wrong people? Not our problem. Honestly, it's the company's own fault for trusting user input so blindly. Tracking users is not a right, it is a privilege and it can be revoked.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0
But on a more serious note, while I somewhat agree that not all marketing is evil, some absolutely is. I do not consider the marketing that cigarette companies did to knowingly hook kids on an addictive, cancer causing substance a good thing; I find it rather evil. Since it can be used for evil, I would rather make it as difficult as possible for them to use it against me. It might be a mostly pointless exercise, but it makes me feel better about it.
This choice is not available in the case of UTM's, at least not in a transparent way that doesn't involve manually stripping them from every URL you click (which is sensitive to user error).
It’s impossible to always create something perfect for the right audience. It’s a lot of guess work. Without having at least a little data, it’s like shooting in the dark.
However, they have crossed a line: they have made URLs ugly by default.
GA gives them basically all of my browsing habits. It's crazy.
They can combine my maps and analytics usage to see when I'm at a PC and when I'm out and about.
Additionally, they have my login data to a number of sites. And my Youtube history. As well as everything sent back by Android and Chrome. And my Gmail history.
And if you use Chrome Sync, they also have (and legally declare that they will use) your browsing history.
Analytics, maps, recaptcha, and fonts, not to mention all the data siphoned from Android, are pieces of a mass surveillance apparatus, used openly for advertising, but potentially shared with governments around the world.
https://github.com/newhouse/url-tracking-stripper
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/url-tracking-strip...
Looks great otherwise!
Here's the github, it looks like the chrome extension linked in the README is no longer there: https://github.com/huntwelch/UTM-Mangler
I use Google Analytics for a side project site I run for the video game Destiny. I like to look at referral URLs so I can see if some publication has linked to me, if a video has been made about my site, or if there's a discussion on reddit going on that would be relevant.
I know it's popular to think about the only entities using analytics are big faceless organisations and sending them to graphic porn websites is cool, but please remember that a) they're still just humans and b) people run cute little side projects like mine and I don't want to see tubgirl or whatever when going through my referrals.
Block GA, strip referrals, whatever. I don't care. Just please don't abuse people like this.
If you're doing "guerrilla advertising for those sites" - I just think you're a wanker. It's ineffective and silly.
Seriously--if you're abusing my privacy by tracking me without my consent (without my ACTUAL consent), what makes you think you have any moral claim whatsoever over me?
You really don't want to be sending offensive material out to people. you don't know who the recipient could be. The chances are it's just their job, and the decision to track you wasn't theirs.
I agree that web tracking is pernicious but responding proportionally is important. The person who ends up clicking on that link very well may have no decision making power in their organization. There's a good chance they're some random minimum wage contractor that found the job through a temp agency. Why is it okay for you to subject them to potentially traumatic content?
It's not really any different from random people sending you random links over a messaging service. Would you click on any "interesting" links sent to you by people you don't know, much less trust? It's the same thing. Offensive websites might have shock value but they're actually quite harmless after you close the tab. What if it's a malware site that exploits some 0day in your browser?
Seems a popular opinion that user tracking = bad but it's more nuanced than that.
edit: And somehow this is auto-downvoted within 30 seconds? This website is so fantastic!
My point here is that, where you see a dishonest human communication, could just as easily have been a different convention in the computer protocol. It's pretty fuzzy where bits of data you send down the wire suddenly have real human-semantic communication impact. The Law has to make those choices, but as hackers we know that it's fundamentally a bit arbitrary, and the Law will only choose to enshrine the conventions that we -- as technologists -- have already set in course anyway.
Maybe it feels dishonest to fudge tracking info -- but to me it feels more dishonest for that tracking mechanism to have become part of the convention of how the web works in the first place. The only question maybe is what point in time are we at: do our actions precede the enshrining of the standards, or are we still forging them. Am I "allowed" to save minimal amounts of bandwidth by dropping ugly parts of URLs, or is that violating a human contract we've chosen to interpret from those bits.
My voice is to the former. The web is unstable; we've let advertising companies run wild for far too long, with the real danger that it's let bad behaviour become the norm. When this goes from social-convention into law, it's too late. But the more normal it is for software to do things differently -- express digital freedom differently -- the more time we have to build a web-convention that gives more power to users.
If they choose to interpret URLs in magical funny ways, so be it, but it's their fault for trusting silly data that silly web browsers are free to do what they want with. Hack the planet.
Well, the trackers have shown none, for a long time. Now they're on the spotlight, it's all complains. Who has to shown restraint, the tracked, or the tracker?
Why? If you found the link interesting enough to click, why worry about it getting logged?
I can understand wanting to tailor your own online experience for speed or privacy. But this is petty, ugly, and vindictive.
We should turn this into an addon that automatically mangles every URL.
I was casually musing about such an idea myself a while back: https://twitter.com/harry_wood/status/735048026335682561 . This offers a way to more actively fight back against the over-use of messy UTM URLs. Perhaps a gentler thing to do would be to link to a place/places which re-educate web developers on how to design URLs. (It seems there's a few folk round here who need some re-education on this matter!)
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/neat-url/
[1] At time of writing, "chrome-utm-stripper: Chrome extension to strip Google Analytics data from URLs"
https://github.com/Smile4ever/firefoxaddons/tree/master/Neat...
Your privacy is much more impacted by the GCLID and DCLID query parameters, which are added by AdWords and DoubleClick campaigns respectively. This are auto-generated by their respective tools and are much more granular.
[1] https://github.com/cixtor/markasread/blob/master/markasread....
[2] https://github.com/cixtor/markasread/blob/master/markasread....
So all I have to do as a webmaster is start using `?aaa_source=foo&aaa_medium=bob`
Then I do `ga(‘send’, ‘pageview’, location.pathname.replace(/aaa/g, ‘utm’)`
A more robust implementation would have to modify the web request to GA itself, assuming the goal is to destroy that data.
EDIT: Upon looking at the actual implementation (`chrome.webRequest.onBeforeRequest`), the points above should be addressable: the key is to strip out potentially URL-encoded utm values in the requets sent to GA [1], which may be either in the query string or the (beacon) POST payload shipped to google-analytics.com).
i.e. `google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&dp={url-encoded-path-with-utm-values}` should be purged as well.
[1]: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...
javascript:window.location=window.location.href.replace(/\?([^#]*)/,function(_,s){s=s.split('&').filter(function(v){return(!/^utm_/.test(v))}).join('&');return(s?'?'+s:'')});- Social sites tend to redirect outbound links to sanitize referral information. So you can get a bunch of traffic from Facebook, and have no idea if it's people viewing your page, going through their news feed, postings in Groups, etc. All of your Facebook traffic will have a referral of (l|lm|m|business|mobile|web).facebook.com/(l.php)? [1]
- Unless someone is using a web client, any clicks from email will show up as direct traffic, just as if someone typed the url in their browser directly. So you can't evaluate email performance in GA without dedicated utm parameters.
- The Source field in GA defaults to the referrer, but is overridden by any explicitly provided utm_source data. If you capture the true referral information separately (i.e. put the value of document.referrer into a custom dimension), you can compare the two and glean all kinds of nifty info like traffic from Site B and Site C resulted from a link on Site A.[2]
- The concerted effort to upgrade sites from http -> https has led to increase in traffic marked as direct that's not direct, because of referral header stripping. Note that it's not inherently an issue with https itself, but with the fact that not everyone is using https yet, combined with the cumulative number of pre-existing http links.[3]
There are plenty more, but those are some of the bigger things I can think of off the top of my head where standard GA falls short and having utm-tagged links are beneficial.
[1] Yes, I'm aware that this regex is lacking escape characters. But having them reduced readability.
[2] If someone takes a utm tagged link from Facebook and shares it on Twitter, by default it'll look like it came from Facebook in GA. Unless you're capturing the document.referrer value manually in a custom dimension, you wouldn't be able to suss out that this was happening and would never know that they're actually coming from Twitter based on a link you shared on Facebook. Or even that they're coming from Twitter at all.
[3] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re...
So, not sure what actually works.
I wonder why Google doesn't build something into Chrome that just hides this crap from the visible URL? I guess they could get some PR pushback from paranoids if they did that though. Better to just hide behind some fictitious UTM Inc.
Why should I care what uses of my information you believe are legitimate?
If that happens with a service I'm already paying for, they get dropped entirely.
It's not my problem how the company chooses to go forward with its product and I honestly don't care. There are alternatives to most things out there.
It's a perfectly valid concern when you install a plugin. We just don't care because most people are trustworthy.
But for example there's a market for selling your browser addon to someone that wants to do this.
If you build this from source, you'll have proof of any malice by the developer.