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Comment by daemonk | Hacker News Reader

Someone should make a plugin that actively sends facebook false tracking information along with your own.

I was seriously considering to make a browser plugin which would scrape pages for Google Analytics unique IDs, make a local database of them and randomly mix them up. Like this:

  0. [page visited]
  1. Does the page contain GA tracking ID?
    no: do nothing
    yes: add it to the database and replace it with another randomly chosen ID from the database

Would pay for that.

Please do this!

Haha thats great. You definatly should. Hell i think i juat found a project to screw around with this weekend!

Wouldn't referral headers give this away? Unless you change those too of course.

You seem to have more clue about web development than I do (my only experience with web are Perl/CGI scripts of early 2000s).

Can you describe in more detail how google could detect that the GA identifier has been swapped and how to prevent detection?

I'm by no means an expert, but usually when a web browser makes a request for a resource it includes a referral header which tells the server where it came from. This header is probably sent both to the initial javascript request and to the tracking pixels it requests to send new info to Google. At a first glance I feel like if you change the tracking id, and the referrals, you may have some success messing with their system.

But again, not an expert and I could easily be missing something crucial.

Too late to edit now, but also I would not be suprised if the javascript they use records the url that is visited and reports that back as well.

IDs are tightly coupled with domains, no?

I wonder if Google would get them banned if this happened.

Now that's a funny idea. Instead of just opting out you can poison the tracking info pool which basically invalidates any of the data they get even the legitimate stuff.

And thereby forcing them to try figure out "who" is creating the poison data, which seems like quite a difficult problem to solve.

*Edit:typo.

Yeah. The data could even be pooled among some users to fuzz the stats even more, the same way some people shuffle their groceries card.

I seem to remember a schoolgirl developing a project to do exactly that, a few months ago on HN. Trying to dig it out now, unless anyone else can chime in?

Sounds like a 2014 variant of emacs' "M-x spook", for tracking rather than the NSA

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