If you're hosting the analytics on your own domain, is it really even something an ad blocker should be blocking? It's not coming from a known third-party service domain (for ads or tracking or otherwise) so there's no real reason a blocker should be blocking it. It's first-party analytics on your own website. The fact that you're implementing it via reverse proxying is kind of an implementation detail, because at any point it could stop being Google Analytics, or an existing first-party analytics solution on a website could become GA.
It is kind of unfortunate that third-party tracking can 'hide' this way but in this case there's not really much you can do if the content author is going out of their way to pull a fast one...
> The fact that you're implementing it via reverse proxying is kind of an implementation detail, because at any point it could stop being Google Analytics, or an existing first-party analytics solution on a website could become GA.
I think you (probably unintentionally if I understand you correctly) actually just pointed out a good reason why those who really really care should block analytics even from the same domain as the site they are visiting : )
Not that it will help against a determined web site owner trying to track though: Very much of the tracking can be done one the server side (and even proxied from the server side to another third party).
Right, my point is essentially that I don't think it's realistic to try and block first-party trackers. They're indistinguishable from page content. The closest you could get would be the 'disable javascript' hammer but there are non-script-based ways to do first party tracking pretty well, I'm sure.
I get why people would want or expect tracking blockers to work on reverse proxying but it seems silly to try. On the bright side, if the tracking is being done first-party it makes it much clearer who's taking your data and who's responsible for where it goes - it's going through them even if they're just bouncing it to another server.
It isn't something they should be blocking, but they try to. uBlock, for example, blocks self-hosted Piwik/Matomo.
But the entitlement of ad-blockers is astounding sometimes: https://github.com/easylist/easylist/pull/900, in which the easylist maintainer defended blocking OpenStreetMap advertising OpenStreetMap events on openstreetmap.org, still makes my jaw drop.
I don't see how it's "entitlement" to control what your computer is doing with data it's receiving from the internet. If anything, I'd say it's the opposite site who is coming across entitled when they think not only they can expect to run any crap on user's machines, but also have the right to bitch about it when it doesn't run.
In that case, would you also say it's entitlement to be installing antimalware or security updates so malware authors are no longer able to run malware on your computer?
It is kind of unfortunate that third-party tracking can 'hide' this way but in this case there's not really much you can do if the content author is going out of their way to pull a fast one...