> Keep in mind that you can replay actual traffic gathered from humans.
Do you mean by replaying the HTTP requests of other humans? You can only do this against the most naive analytics tools. Most modern analytics will use nonces and unique event IDs to deduplicate/trash any junk. Already in competitive markets/industries (looking at you, travel) it's common for 95%+ of analytics data to be junk/fraud/poison.
I can assure you that, except in the very rare cases of people stupid enough to launch poisoning attacks from Western countries, the law has not stopped or slowed junk analytics data. It is purely a technical defence, and it works very well.
> uBlock can only defeat client-side tracking - which has so far been _the_ tracking, sure, but I believe it is in the process of being replaced by server-side, which can't be defeated this way.
For the most part, the current form of server-side analytics just means relaying data through a proxy you control so that you can control exactly what the downstream services get and they never see the user's IP address, user-agent, etc. The most popular service by far, Google Tag Manager, still uses a very obvious and blockable client-side Google Analytics tag (that you serve via the same proxy) to actually collect the data in the browser.
>Do you mean by replaying the HTTP requests of other humans?
No, that would be too obvious. I’m thinking more of replaying human interactions with a browser within a VM, or perhaps replaying them using some sort of hidden tabs, so the user session cookies stay as they were, but the behavior that can be associated with them would be jammed.
As for server analytics - it’s not very relevant now, because there’s no need, but once google is prevented from exploiting it they will inevitably switch to tracking all the client details on the (google’s) server side.
Do you mean by replaying the HTTP requests of other humans? You can only do this against the most naive analytics tools. Most modern analytics will use nonces and unique event IDs to deduplicate/trash any junk. Already in competitive markets/industries (looking at you, travel) it's common for 95%+ of analytics data to be junk/fraud/poison.
I can assure you that, except in the very rare cases of people stupid enough to launch poisoning attacks from Western countries, the law has not stopped or slowed junk analytics data. It is purely a technical defence, and it works very well.
> uBlock can only defeat client-side tracking - which has so far been _the_ tracking, sure, but I believe it is in the process of being replaced by server-side, which can't be defeated this way.
For the most part, the current form of server-side analytics just means relaying data through a proxy you control so that you can control exactly what the downstream services get and they never see the user's IP address, user-agent, etc. The most popular service by far, Google Tag Manager, still uses a very obvious and blockable client-side Google Analytics tag (that you serve via the same proxy) to actually collect the data in the browser.