On: How Bear does analytics with CSS

[chrismorgan]

This approach is no harder to block than the JavaScript approaches: you’re just blocking requests to certain URL patterns.

[nannal → chrismorgan]

That approach would work until analytics gets mixed in with actual styles and then you're trying to use a website without CSS.

[chrismorgan → nannal]

You’re blocking the image, not the CSS. Here’s a rule to catch it at present:

  ||bearblog.dev/hit/

This is the shortest it can be written with certainty of no false positives, but you can do things like making the URL pattern more specific (e.g. /hit/*/) or adding the image option (append $image) or just removing the ||bearblog.dev domain filter if it spread to other domains as well (there probably aren’t enough false positives to worry about).

I find it also worth noting that all of these techniques are pretty easily circumventable by technical means, by blending content and tracking/ads/whatever. In case of all-out war, content blockers will lose. It’s just that no one has seen fit to escalate that far (and in some cases there are legal limitations, potentially on both sides of the fight).

[macNchz → chrismorgan]

> In case of all-out war, content blockers will lose. It’s just that no one has seen fit to escalate that far (and in some cases there are legal limitations, potentially on both sides of the fight).

The Chrome Manifest v3 and Web Environment Integrity proposals are arguably some of the clearest steps in that direction, a long term strategy being slow-played to limit pushback.