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Comment by smart_asslop | Hacker News Reader

Hello! It appears that you are disseminating misinformation.

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.

Which corroborates the mysteriously flagged sibling comment.

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!

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It's not misinformation. By default Google has been able to click track with JS. If you disable JS, they don't serve you search (https://serpapi.com/blog/google-now-requires-javascript/). Yes, if you are tricky, you can block just the part of the JS that does click tracking, probably. But most users can't do that. They therefore were already getting 99% complete click tracking before this change. This change is not about click tracking, it's about blocking scrapers.

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...

>By default Google has been able to click track with JS. If you disable JS, they don't serve you search (https://serpapi.com/blog/google-now-requires-javascript/).

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.

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