Hacker News Reader

Comment by TekMol | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if uBlock origin has overshot the mark.

It even blocks self-hosted analytics scripts from the same domain. By default.

I don't see how that is a good thing. It just makes the lives of people who run websites harder. When I visit a website, I have some sympathy towards the person who runs it.

Disabling scripts which talk to self-hosted analytics software makes it hard to figure out how users use a website. Especially when the site is using a CDN. So people enable tracking on the CDN level. Which means now CloudFlare, Amazon etc store that data again. Lose-lose for everybody.

View on HN

> makes it hard to figure out how users use a website

Isn't that the whole point? A user with the no tracking filters turned on in uBO is intentionally trying to opt out. I don't have much sympathy for site owners unless they also offer a first party opt-out option (which I've never seen so far even given the cookie banners). Site owners are no more entitled to track than a site user is to block even first party trackers. (Also wouldn't a site owner be able to use server logs anyways?)

As for defaults, I think when it comes to the point that someone is installing uBO specifically, they're usually sophiscated enough to configure filters. Most of the people I know (even those in tech) don't use any form of adblock or tracking blocking. (I don't know how they can manage to always be vigilant and avoid all the dark patterns, but to each their own.)

It is an unfortunate reality of how the Internet is built.

There's quite a few people like you, that are fine with self-hosted analytics, either because you believe the principles of the websites you visit, or because you've done so-called "good" analytics, and so disable that kind of blocking, hoping your trust won't be abused.

Problem is, some of us don't believe those principles hold, and/or have seen people doing vacuum-style analytics. I've listened to conversations of otherwise well-intentioned devs who are otherwise anti-ads and anti-unnecessary data collection ask for more data to be collected in analytics because "we might need it". Leaves a very sour taste in my mouth. So I block it all - what I can, of course. If they find ways around it that I can't block, at least I've done my best.

Same domain doesn't always mean your information won't get leaked to wherever. For example, Sentry supports sending data through a proxy hosted on the same domain used by the website. If you don't block it, your data ends up on sentry.io anyway (in most cases; some users probably self-host their own Sentry instance, but how many? It's quite painful from my personal experience.)

https://docs.sentry.io/platforms/javascript/troubleshooting/...

> It just makes the lives of people who run websites harder.

User agent. The browser is meant to serve the user's interests. The wants or desires of people who run websites are their own problems, not the user agent's problems.

I don't even run first party javascript by default, only on a whitelist basis. Most of the time, even first party javascript only makes the website worse from my perspective as a user. Javascript's most common purpose is to implement annoyances and spyware, legitimate functionality comes third.

I think we put up with a lot because we give smaller businesses a pass on bad practices and focus our energy on the "bad" bigger players. But I don't think being an underdog means that society should accept PII surveillance - society is made up of underdogs.

It is frustrating. At the end of the day uBlock can only block what it can see. If I'm an asshole web host I can still take your IP and every other bit of data that I can gobble up from the HTTP headers and sell those off to the highest bidder and uBlock can't do anything about that. So, nefarious actors still be nefarious actors.

Disclaimer: I use uBlock.

I share this sentiment. I use content blockers to avoid annoyances and trackers, but I'm ok with healthy ads and other local stats. The problem is not being able to distinguish them at scale.

> I'm ok with healthy ads

no such thing as a healthy ad!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com