Read the full story from Bellingcat.
Google Analytics is a popular service for tracking and analysing traffic to a website. Through a short code placed in the source of a website, a user can monitor the performance of all their online properties. These tracking codes can also clearly indicate when multiple websites are run by a single user or entity — meaning they have been a particularly useful breadcrumb for open source researchers.
But there is a catch: Google is phasing out these codes and replacing them with ones that contain less data and make it harder to track who controls sites.
To address this problem, Bellingcat has developed a lightweight open source research tool—Wayback Google Analytics — which automates the collection of tracking codes and discovery of relationships between websites using copies of sites maintained by The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. This will help researchers sidestep recent changes to how Google manages its analytics data.
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