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by rvnx
2673 days ago
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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. |
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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.