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Comment by robmil | Hacker News Reader

For those about to bemoan the breaking of things like Google Analytics: this patch only blocks third party cookies from domains that the user has never visited before. Since 99% of your visitors will have visited google.com, your Analytics should continue to function even after this update.

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The GA script loads from google-analytics.com, not google.com.

    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';

Safari already blocks most third-party cookies, yet Google Analytics works in Safari. An explanation of how GA pulls it off can be found here: http://webpolicy.org/2012/02/17/safari-trackers/

that looks like they're talking about doubleclick, not google analytics. GA works by setting a first party cookie, so there's no need to work around anything. https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...

edit: oh, jonknee already mentioned that below.

Google can just change their analytics domain to google.com. Safari already uses this cookie policy.

Except Google Analytics doesn't use third party cookies so it's a moot point.

https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...

Does this mean that GA can't track users across websites?

They could theoretically do both by having the JS on the page set one cookie on the host domain and having the server response set one on the GA domain. I don't believe they do, however.

Shameless self mention: Chartbeat does not do this either.

Wouldn't that count as a third-party cookie? It depends on whether "third party" is defined as "third party from the server response" or "third party from the domain of the loaded page".

Google provides a way to do it: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...

That's still a piss-poor heuristic to rely on -- especially because it biases your analytics data toward google-users.

It isn't isolated to Google users, it gives control of tracking back to websites that users actually go to.

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