Experimenting with Blocking Bloomreach / Exponea Requests from Internet Banking

I have experimented with blocking analytics requests to Exponea servers during my internet banking session using uBlock Origin. What have I found out?

Bloomreach (formerly Exponea) is a marketing automation platform providing analytics service centered around customer data (in addition to other services). In this case my bank can see how often I visit internet banking and what I usually do there. Of course, analytics dashboards are rarely interested in individual users but they rather aggregate data of user segments or target groups.

Log out is forced

Once Exponea requests are blocked via uBlock Origin a couple of times, internet banking website assumes an internet connection was not working and forced the logout.

It happened after sendPackageOfEvents was blocked (failed) about five times.

It would probably happen if any other backend requests were blocked as well. The REST API for this internet banking does not seem to distinguish between different requests in terms of being online as it sends lots of requests in the background. Event sendPackageOfEvents is just one of many others, but this one clearly aggregates package of user events and sends it to backend once in a while.

Internet banking is interesting and trying to find out how it works under hood as well. Blocking analytics is not straightforward when done this well.