Mountain View delivers Google Analytics opt-out
Found on The Register on Monday, 24 May 2010
Mountain View has released a browser add-on that opts you out of Google Analytics, the traffic monitoring service now used by 71 per cent of the top domains on the interwebs.
According to a study from the University of California, Berkeley, Google Analytics was used on 71 per cent of roughly 400,000 top domains as of March 2009.
The Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on is available for Internet Explorer 7 and 8, Google Chrome 4.x and higher, and Mozilla Firefox 3.5 and higher.
There's really not much need for a plugin when you simply can blacklist the tracking domains. Just a few more lines to your hosts file, and no more analytics tracking. Instead of clogging up the browser with another plugin, Google could have simply told users how to block the domains it's using, like pagead2.googlesyndication.com, www.google-analytics.com, googlesyndication.com, google-analytics.com, ssl.google-analytics.com and ajax.googleapis.com for a start.