#874 Google news click tracking

[dan stahlke]

On news.google.com, when you hover over the links the legitimate address is displayed on the browser's status bar. However, when you click the link it appears that google rewrites it to direct to their servers so they can tell which stories you are reading. I found this out by using a network sniffer. The rule below prevents this. The first redirect cleans up the URL by removing tailing "&..." options which would otherwise be interpreted by the fast-redirects function.

{+redirect{s@(news.google.com/news/url.*&url=http[^&]*)&.*$@$1@}}
news.google.com/news/url.*&url=http.*&.*

{+fast-redirects{check-decoded-url}}
news.google.com/news/url

[Fabian Keil]

Thanks for the report.

I can't reproduce this with my browser configuration. Probably it requires JavaScript, a Google account or something else.

Can you provide example URLs for both sections that we could use for regression testing?

[dan stahlke]

Here is the log. The long URL (second to last) is the one relevant to this bug report. On my setup, I also block the "logXhrAction" URLs because they sound like they may be trackers. The very last URL is the real one for the news story. Notice that the redirect URL contains trailing ampersand parameters that need to be truncated.

Oct 19 09:02:32.411 7f39ea3fd700 Request: news.google.com/news/xhr/logXhrAction?
Oct 19 09:02:33.601 7f39ea3fd700 Request: www.gstatic.com/news/img/favicon.ico
Oct 19 09:02:35.484 7f39ea3fd700 Request: news.google.com/news/xhr/logXhrAction?&eit=s
Oct 19 09:02:35.498 7f39daffd700 Request: news.google.com/news/xhr/eit?authuser=0
Oct 19 09:02:35.505 7f39e91f4700 Request: news.google.com/news/xhr/logXhrAction?
Oct 19 09:02:35.508 7f39e99f5700 Request: news.google.com/news/xhr/logXhrAction?&tgs=a
Oct 19 09:02:35.521 7f39e89f3700 Request: news.google.com/news/url?ct2=us%2F0_0_s_1_1_a&sa=t&usg=AFQjCNHJWPc7ffoSXPSqBRz55jDA0KgxOQ&cid=8797762374160&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052970204485304576640791304008536.html&ei=YcqeTsymCIjxggf8uQE&rt=HOMEPAGE&vm=STANDARD&bvm=section&did=-6537064229385238098
Oct 19 09:02:35.659 7f39e89f3700 Request: online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204485304576640791304008536.html

[Fabian Keil]

Thanks for the example URLs.

I merged and slightly adjusted the two sections and added the result to user.action (commented out).