Hacker News Reader

Comment by nottorp | Hacker News Reader

I don't see the point in using an ad blocker but running Chrome. It's not like Google would allow the ad blocker to filter their own tracking.

Sadly, the only option seems to be Firefox and the niche browsers.

View on HN

Ad blockers on Chrome block Google's ads too. The ad script doesn't even run, so it's not getting as far as collecting any data.

(I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)

In Chrome and Safari, Google search injects analytics via the ping attribute on <a> tags. This sends some additional ping-to and ping-from headers. So Google is still collecting data from who use its search, provided they are not on Firefox. I would assume it does the same for its other products, such as Google Analytics, but I haven't checked.

The "ping" attribute is available to all sites and many content blocking extensions (including ad blockers) block these pings. This isn't changing with Manifest V3: extensions will still be able to block them.

Note that on Firefox and other browsers that do not support "ping", Google Search still tracks which links you click on, but it uses URL rewriting. There are also extensions that block this.

Thanks for the correction.

If I were Chrome, I would proxy these requests securely through an innocent-looking API. I hope no one is getting any ideas.

It's probably moot anyway. We all know the direction Google/Chrome is going in. Not much we can do at this point.

> If I were Chrome, I would proxy these requests securely through an innocent-looking API. I hope no one is getting any ideas.

Don't they vet all urls you click on for malware? :) There's one of your innocent looking APIs.

I wasn't talking about the ads, but lower level tracking.

Not OP, but the main reason for me to use adblockers is not to prevent tracking, but to block ads. This alone makes websites load significantly faster and it sometimes prevents dozens of annoying ads per webpage.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com