The Google Analytics service provides enhanced traffic analysis services for websites, unfortunately it requires that viewers accept certain cookies or your web site hangs. As a site viewer, there is something you can do about this.

For website owners, getting some statistics on your site performance is a Good Thing. If you've spent your hard-earned money developing and maintaining the site, it makes sense to see how many people are using it, what pages they're most interested in and how they found you.

Google Analytics[1] is a service that adds some code to your site that tracks visitors and feeds this data to a web based reporting engine. There's nothing wrong with this as a concept, my issue with this particular approach is that if you block the Google analytics cookie, the web site hangs. As a viewer, you are forced to either accept the cookies (which are generally site specific, but not always - see the section on cookies in [2]) or go somewhere else.

Site owners might want to think about this - are you loosing traffic because of this cookie requirement?

As a viewer, the good news is that Google provide a browser add-on that (in theory) bypasses this requirement.

Opting out

This is as easy as installing the Opt-out Browser Add-on [3]:

Accept the terms of service agreement (it's not like you have a choice) and follow the usual installation prompts. You'll probably have to restart your browser:

Repeat for any other browsers you use.

Caution

I haven't proven that this add-on actually stops all Google analytics traffic or that is has no other effects, so useit at your own risk.

References

[1] Google Analytics home page

[2] Google Analytics privacy information

[3] Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on