How can I prevent Google from tracking my visits to web sites?

January 24, 2008 8:21 AM

How can I prevent Google from tracking my visits to web sites that use their services (Google Analytics, AdWords, etc.)?

The privacy implications are troubling and I'd like to banish Google from my computer entirely. It's running Mac OS X.

posted by Ø to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

All that tracking is done through cookies. Camino can deny all cookies on a per-domain basis, as can Firefox. As for Safari, I don't see an option to do so.
posted by mkb at 8:23 AM on January 24, 2008

This is covered in the Google Analytics/AdWords Help documentation.
posted by bryanjbusch at 8:28 AM on January 24, 2008

You can probably edit your hosts file to prevent your computer even from connecting to certain sites (google.com, doubleclick.com, etc.) I'm afraid I don't know how it's done in OS X, but it's gotta be possible.
posted by kidbritish at 8:29 AM on January 24, 2008

If you have the Google toolbar, disable the PageRank feature.
posted by HotPatatta at 8:32 AM on January 24, 2008

Check out Privoxy.
posted by ikkyu2 at 8:33 AM on January 24, 2008

Firefox extension Customize Google will block analytics, not sure about ad words.
posted by starman at 8:41 AM on January 24, 2008

I use NoScript with firefox and have google-analytics.com permanently blacklisted. I'm very tempted to blacklist it at the router level at home as well.
posted by Skorgu at 9:10 AM on January 24, 2008

Scroogle.
posted by user92371 at 9:52 AM on January 24, 2008

As long as you're blocking google-analytics.com, it might also be worthwhile to block googlesyndication.com while you're at it (note: might break AdWords).
posted by box at 10:39 AM on January 24, 2008

AdBlock in Firefox will also work.
posted by blue_beetle at 10:49 AM on January 24, 2008