In theory, centralizing such requests with a ping should make it much easier for a browser to disable the pings, so if anything this improves security. Of course, if Google wanted to detect the lack of clicks from a given user and fall back to redirection, they could, in which case the net benefit and harm for security would be zero.

As others have said, there is no way to prevent Google from gathering this information, so adding the capability to a browser doesn't change the situation.