Google Analytics Event Permutation

Question

since the 9th of Sep some events (about 0,01 %) and their dimensions were unreadable by permutation. Like the event \"VideoView\" becomes to \"eiVwoediV\".

Does anybody

Answer 1

We caught it! We luckily had a known customer who created such requests and we phoned him!

We nailed it down to one Firefox plugin:

https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/cliqz/

We could reproduce the described behaviour by installing the plugin. The strange thing is, that the add-on has not been modified recently, regarding to addon.mozilla.org.

The malicious version we installed is version 1.0.37, and can be installed from https://s3.amazonaws.com/cdncliqz/update/Cliqz.1.0.37.xpi It seems, they tested some anti-tracker functionality. Probably they uploaded some new rules on 2015-09-09.

Thank you for four days of searching.

Answer 2

I am Tomas and I am a Software Engineer at CLIQZ.

We are a German Startup who are integrating search and innovative privacy features into browsers. This is indeed a result of our Anti Tracking feature. A similar question was also asked on reddit and it was already answered by our head of PR, so I will just quote the same answer here:

CLIQZ Anti Tracking is not designed to block tracking in general, but rather only the tracking of individual users — which we consider a violation of our users’ privacy, and therefore inappropriate. Unlike other anti-tracking systems, ours doesn’t block the signals completely; thus, website owners are able to get data for legitimate uses, such as counting visits.

To prevent the identification of users (e.g. by using JavaScript hashes), CLIQZ Anti Tracking does in fact permute strings. . Whenever a new tracker shows up in our data, our system initially treats it as a user-identifying tracker and changes the string to preventively protect our users. Our system uses so called k-anonymity techniques. If it sees the same string for an event with multiple users showing up independently over the course of several days, it puts it on a whitelist of legitimate, non-identifying trackers. Once a tracker is whitelisted, it remains unmodified and website-owners see the original string. In other words, CLIQZ Anti Tracking limits the functionality of legitimate trackers only temporarily. As soon as it becomes clear that a tracker doesn’t violate our user’s privacy, everything works as usual. Privacy is extremely important to us and we believe this technology is necessary to protect our users from snooping.

I hope this helps.