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Comment by darkstar999 | Hacker News Reader

I opted out with ublock origin and dns blocking.

And by using Firefox, or an ungoogled Chromium.

As far as I understand Firefox uses it for various browser features like its add-on page, it also prevents add-ons from running on these sites.

Firefox disables Google Analytics even without any add-ons if you have the anti-tracking options on. This also works on "special" pages. Go to addons.mozilla.org and have a gander at dev tools:

  [GA] Do Not Track Enabled; Google Analytics not loaded and tracking disabled

Edit: actually, this is them simply respecting your DNT policy, but Firefox also has a special blocker for these things. It also ships with some shims that unbreak badly developed sites which break without Analytics scripts present.

Has Firefox stopped using Google Analytics for themselves (IIRC they used it to monitor how people where using the “preference” section of Firefox, which caused quite a bit of outrage when it was known)?

same. using ublock on desktop (firefox and edge) and mobile (firefox). why kill only google analytics when there are thousands of creeps

Same: Brave Browser, ublock origin, privacy badger, pihole.

I opted out by setting the do-not-track header.

Does that actually do anything? I was always under the impression the DNT header was just screaming into the void.

I recently saw the NYT has a paragraph in their CCPA document that speaks about the DNT header, although without using the word header. They say the text in the footer changes based on the opt-out so maybe they're handling that server side, but I haven't checked it

https://www.nytimes.com/privacy/california-notice

I've noticed that on some sites where I enable cookies and JS, the cookie banner/popup has fewer checkboxes preselected with DNT than without. I don't know how to check if they honor my choices, but at least this is something you could sue them over coz of GDPR.

Very few advertising companies actually supported DNT, due to a lack of regulatory or voluntary requirements for its use.

> DNT is not widely adopted by the industry, with companies citing the lack of legal mandates for its use, as well as unclear standards and guidelines for how websites are to interpret the header. Thus, critics proport that it is not guaranteed enabling DNT will actually have any effect at all.

> — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track

You basically didn't

It's an industry standard. Folks better adhere to it or else they might get into legal trouble.

It doesn't have legal force. Wikipedia tells me it isn't really even a proper standard; standardisation efforts stopped when it became clear it wasn't going to be effective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track_legislation

isn't Google Chrome's Manifest V3 update going to limit effectiveness of uBlock Origin and similar content blockers?

Well obviously you should be using a browser that actually supports uBlock Origin for it to work.

the chromium variant I use will be impacted; FF is adopting Manifest V3 too, it seems - https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2021/05/27/manifest-v3-updat...

They are adopting v3 but the important aspect is they are not deprecating the old v2 functionality. Chrome is deprecating v2 which will break these types of extensions.

From the blog post, FF will keep the functionality to block web requests, unlike chrome.

> After discussing this with several content blocking extension developers, we have decided to implement DNR and continue maintaining support for blocking webRequest

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