They own the JS on the page, they don't need the redirects to know where you clicked...
A uBlock Origin developer now confirms, regarding Google results click tracking:
It existed in a way or another, but it could be blocked. Now it can't.
https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1we7491/how_t...
Next time, please consider listening to people who know how the web works and avoid overconfidently parroting what Big Tech gatekeepers want you to think.
Thanks!
And btw about the result filtering the uBlock dev wants to do: of course this can still be done, if you preload all the goto links on the page and then inline the real URLs returned by the preload requests. Perhaps not easy to do as an extension but at a browser level (Brave?) totally possible. Though Google might then think your users are scrapers...
This discussion is about search results pages with JavaScript enabled.
>And btw about the result filtering the uBlock dev wants to do
For a long time, uBlock Origin has kept up with blocking Google's click tracking out of the box with the default Privacy filter list (privacy.txt).
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/blob/master/filters/...
This means that all uBlock Origin users (even people with no Google account) would NOT be click-tracked, WITH JavaScript enabled.
You say "They own the JS on the page", so the topic of discussion here is simply whether users could block click tracking on the client side.
And until now, they could have: by installing uBlock Origin or any content blocker with a sane privacy list.
Now, they cannot.