Interesting, what kind of cookies? Like I say in the article Lou Montulli from Netscape is generally credited with creating the HTTP cookie, which they named cookie based upon magic cookies in unix, though its obviously quite a bit different.
This is a great way to unpack that phrase, thank you! I started the article with that phrase because of the insincere absurdity of it exactly as you describe.
I agree that most people would not mind that scenario, the issue is that that scenario requires the same consent box that the most invasive adtech would use and it's far too onerous on the user as things are now to discern the difference.
Hi, the exact wording on the poll was
"If given the option, I would prefer not to be tracked online."
The reason why I didn't define "tracked" for the people taking the poll is that I think that's the most representative way to replicate the question that consent boxes are theoretical asking, but in an abstract way out of the context of a specific website. When a user sees that consent box, they have little to no idea of what tracking is actually happening.
Hmm, I guess that's a good rationale, but unfortunately it's still useless. I believe that websites adopted the simplistic "don't track me" language because they want to appear to be embracing the law. I've asked a lot of people (> 100) what it means to them to be "tracked" and they have no idea what it means, but they're afraid of whatever it means.
No SEO effects. If anything there could be a slight advantage to using Plausible over GA because the JS tracker is much smaller, though in practice I would not expect any SEO impact.
Plausible is much simpler than UA, all the reporting is on one page and it has much more limited config options. It also can import your UA data. If you're looking for a simplified GA alternative it's a very good choice. (Full disclosure, I recently published an article on their blog about UA vs GA4: https://plausible.io/blog/ua-vs-ga4)
You've probably already discovered this, but the only way you drill down is with filters. You can ad-hoc define a page filter with multiple URLs, but you can't (to my knowledge) save that filter set, and content grouping UA-style doesn't exist. Their live demo is with their own site's data: https://plausible.io/plausible.io
I believe AdNauseam uses EasyList, so if it doesn't include the EasyPrivacy part of that (which contains the trackers) by default it seems like it would be easy to add.
That said, I don't think this is an effective strategy at all. Safari has placed a big giant hole in tracking (like 20% of users) and lots of sites are still proceeding like nothing has changed. Google referrer spam was run at mega-scale dumping billions (at least) of spam hits into millions of profiles and didn't effect tracking efforts.
A plugin run by .0001% of users or whatever that adds in a bunch of slop to the numbers just makes more analysts pull out their hair rather than leading to change.
Loved AWStats! Still can be useful — but bots, client side caching, CDNs, and did I mention bots..? have made the data hard to rely on for much. A while ago I switched from AWStats to GoAccess (https://goaccess.io/) for this kind of thing. I prefer its interface, and it's way way faster to churn through big log files (C vs. Perl).
ITP now also degrades first party server-set cookies to 7 days where the first part of the IPs don't match. So if you're using CNAMEs for your measurement and the you have a.a.x.x and b.b.x.x it will downgrade.
Wow. OK, so the servers can just proxy the requests. Then what's Safari gonna do? Unless they totally eliminate all state and cookies in browsers, they can't prevent that!
