[PrivacyBadger] tracking CGI args

[Cooper Quintin]

Hi Greg,
I think that this is super interesting and I definitely want to root out
this type of tracking. I think maybe the best place to raise this idea
would be on Github.  I would love to hear more though about how you
think we could detect this sort of behavior.

- Cooper

On 03/22/2016 12:36 PM, Greg Lindahl wrote:
> For a long while I've been annoyed by tracking CGI args, like the
> Urchin/Google Analytics utm_* args. Like cookies, sometimes they have
> long, unique-looking values, other times they have short values.
> 
> There are a few browser plugins in this area:
> 
> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/au-revoir-utm/?src=cb-dl-toprated
> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tracking-token-stripper/kcpnkledgcbobhkgimpbmejgockkplob?hl=en
> 
> but they are driven by static lists (like utm_*), which is not as
> flexible and comprehensive as the Privacy Badger approach.
> 
> I recently started working at the Internet Archive, where our crawler
> and Wayback Machine playback are both needlessly confused by these CGI
> args, in both the long, unique form & the short form. Our crawler has
> the ability to discover some of these tracking args by noticing that
> multiple urls, differing only in their cgi args, deliver pages with
> the same hash.
> 
> If you're interested at all, I could imagine several ways you might
> want to proceed. I'm happy to provide data from IA's crawler, and I'd
> also like to consume any data that you folks generate.
> 
> -- greg
> 
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