That's interesting, and good to know! I wonder if the heuristic can be bypassed by changing the code (e.g. adding a semicolon) or changing the URL further.
Also you asked in your article whether this can be used for ads.
Yes, there is an Israeli company offering to publishers to configure nginx as a reverse-proxy ( https://vip.wordpress.com/plugins/yavli/ ) and they serve the ads as small chunks of images (to not match the usual 300x250 or 468x60).
Of course it can be bypassed and it's not very difficult. It's just that the way of filtering is different (many browsers / extensions are just Easylist/Disconnect clones)
To go further on the proxy idea, I think that the best strategy could be to actually do server-side calls to GA:
https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/hit-builder/ (yes there is an API for server-side hits).
The minus of the proxy idea, is that since you don't have access to *.doubleclick.net (which should be blacklisted by any decent track/adblocker) you don't get demographics info back into GA.
But after all, like other comments said, aren't you simply a first party tracker ?
GA is just a more evolved storage point than, let's say using goaccess on raw logs.
> To go further on the proxy idea, I think that the best strategy could be to actually do server-side calls to GA: https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/hit-builder/ (yes there is an API for server-side hits).
Yes, probably big players would like to use server side analytics! But that's a bit too involved for small websites.
> The minus of the proxy idea, is that since you don't have access to *.doubleclick.net (which should be blacklisted by any decent track/adblocker) you don't get demographics info back into GA.
When I pull down Google Analytics I also change its content to make it point to the reverse proxy itself. I didn't find any call to that domain being blocked, so I didn't do it for that particular case.
I think that the data collections is done via https://www.google-analytics.com/r/collect, which I do proxy. Notice however that sometimes an easy list filter kicks in and blocks that just because it happens to match "r/collect". I think there is a race condition somewhere that makes it not work sometimes, because I couldn't replicate it consistently. Anyways, it would be as simple as changing that domain specifically to something else. I tried doing so, but Netlify's redirects where playing up (possibly because I'm on the free tier) so I gave up. The concept of masking the domain/url still applies.
Yes, there is an Israeli company offering to publishers to configure nginx as a reverse-proxy ( https://vip.wordpress.com/plugins/yavli/ ) and they serve the ads as small chunks of images (to not match the usual 300x250 or 468x60).
It made Easylist quite angry at the time: https://easylist.to/2015/08/19/issues-with-yavli-advertising...