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Adi
Adi

Reputation: 1

Why do Google Analytics 4 (GA4) network calls fire on "stackoverflow.com" even after turning off the cookies from the OneTrust Cookie settings?

Why do Google Analytics 4 (GA4) network calls fire on "stackoverflow.com" even after turning off the cookies from the OneTrust Cookie settings?

Please click on the links to view the screenshots attached.

Thank You -- Adi

GA4 network calls fire even with no user consent by OneTrust settings

stackoverflow cookie policy - GA is a performance cookie

Turned off the performance cookies from the OneTrust Cookie settings section on stackoverflow.com. This should have disabled GA4 and stopped its network calls for further website interaction but it did not stop and GA4 calls are still being made out to GA servers as seen in the screenshot.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 839

Answers (1)

BNazaruk
BNazaruk

Reputation: 8111

Why wouldn't it fire?

Strictly speaking, cookies aren't necessary for tracking to happen. Usually, the only thing that's lost without cookies is the context of the tracking. Mostly the session and the user scope are lost.

But you're logged in, so there's no real need to use Google's client id to get the user scope back. They just need to track your user id from the Strictly Necessary cookie. Which I don't think SO does. SO doesn't really care much about their front-end data analytics or digital marketing. Which probably makes sense when you have this amount of backend data anyways. Just judging from what they can do with achievements.

Also I don't believe one trust and similar systems override the cookie setting method. They just poll cookies and when they detect offenders, they delete them. Mind you, this is just from what I've seen them doing. Maybe there are ones that do it in a better way. But polling is not perfect since a tracking library would often set a cookie and use it in sync, so there's nothing that can interfere in between. But legally speaking, that cookie would be useless really. Just some randomly generated numbers to maintain context for the next call, by which it will get deleted again and will be regenerated from scratch again.

A proper way to block analytics from firing when consent is not given is, of course, maintain blockers in the TMS so that tracking logic wouldn't even fire when the consent is not given, but looks like SO doesn't bother with this level of elaboration.

Upvotes: 0

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