Today google launched their free tracking tool for webmasters. It keeps track of visitor movements and clicks on the webmasters site. There are probably some visitors who don´t like their movements and clicks to be analyzed in detail.
For those digital inspiration found a way to prevent that this data is sent to google for further analyzing. Whenever you visit a site that uses google analytics a small javascript file is downloaded to the visitors pc which reports the movement to google.
Now, to prevent this one simply has to add a line to his windows host file, which is located in system32/drivers/etc/host for windows xp and 2000 and in hosts/ for the other windows systems.
The line that needs to be added is
127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com
It redirects every request of www.google-analytics.com to 127.0.0.1 which is your own system. The script can´t find the js file and therefor nothing is reported.
Simply delete the line if you want to remove this again.
Technorati Tags: google, analytics, prevent, spy, analyse
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5 Responses to “Prevent Google Analytics from tracking your visit”
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[...] Prevent Google Analytics from tracking your visit, sowas hilft __________darknight, die wo anders Heike ist. [...]
.. You act as if its spyware. Who cares if a webmaster has a little graph of how many people use whatever browser or how many people are visiting a certain page? It’s not a bad thing and alot of the time, it’s for the better. There is never a negative side to it. This is something that has been around for a long time but has costed money. Google is putting it out there for free. There is no point in this ghacks story.
It’s for the better of the internet, so my advice is to not get rid of it. Google analytics doesn’t spy on what websites you go to, steal your passwords, or add anything to your computer.
I agree with you that even if people use this line in their host file the site admin is still able to track their movement throughout his site.
The main reason I added this story was that I thought it incredibly brilliant to simply edit the hosts file to prevent google analytics from functioning at all.
thanks for your comments :)
“Small script”? It’s 18000 k, and thus it slows matters noticeably over a modem connection. With brodband this kind of nonsense accumulates and ends up costing money.
My pc hangs while waiting for google-analytics to load. I have not asked for this everytime I visit a site and resent both the delay and the fact they data mine me. Some people are far too compalcent about invasion of privacy. Grow a spine. Look at some of the characters behind companies like Google and wise up.