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Comment by gliptic | Hacker News Reader

> Choose any path you want for setting up first-party mode. Examples of paths you might want to use include: /metrics, /securemetric, /analytics, or preferably a random alphanumeric string that you don't use on your website already.

Ah, yes, _preferably_ some random string that is hard to block rather than the descriptive ones.

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To be honest I wasn't sure why sites weren't doing this already, it seemed very obvious to me at the time, when I learned that uBlock Origin has a hardcoded list of paths to block.

It is becoming common. For example Segment has a documentation for similar setup: https://segment.com/docs/connections/sources/catalog/librari...

I've seen this being implemented at least 5 years ago so probably a lot of sites already do it,

Yeah, it’s just that some trackers are more ubiquitous than others and gtag is one of the most deployed.

You know, like malware.

"Like" is being too generous when we know what, why, and how they do what they do.

It's more like the opposite of what malware does--malware usually names things so they will look like something you want. Like malware would be naming the directory something like /images or /fonts.

Wow just in time for ManifestV3, which would prevent clever heuristics like looking at the entropy of the path segment.

Well yes, how else will you

> The setup in this documentation will help you recover X% more measurement signals on your website.

Obviously "recover" is not the correct word here. Maybe "swindle" is a better word, considering they are actively circumventing the users' wishes to block tracking.

It used to be that codepen used puppies-and-kittens... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35981467

Obfuscation is the 'Google' way /s

"Privacy centric users hate this 1 trick"

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