Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)

Blocking of feigning responses to particular remote APIs is still better than having to run a bunch of random tracking JS snippets, because without one of them a page just errors out.

Pretty sure a big ban hammer is coming for Google with all such shenanigans, especially in trigger happy places like Europe and India who don't like their citizens tracked and are happy to create legislative bans.

So you may win the cat and mouse adblock game but what are you gonna do when countries start making it illegal to use GA? (1)

(1) https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2022/02/10/frenc...?

God damn... this is it, this is the end-game. There's no way to fight this unless you customize and maintain blocking scripts for each individual website.

Yes, websites could always have done this, but the REST (CDN-bypassing) requests' cost and the manual maintenance for the telemetry endpoints and storage was an impediment that Google just gives them a drop-in solution for :(

I think Google is happy to eat some of the cost for the "proxy" server given the abundance of data they'll be gobbling up (not just each request's query string and users' IP address but -being a subdomain- all the 1st party cookies as well). I don't have the time or energy to block JavaScript and/or manually inspect each domain's requests to figure out if they use server-side tracking or not.

I honestly don't know if there's any solution to this at all. Maybe using an archive.is-like service that renders the static page (as an image at the extreme), or a Tor-like service and randomizes one's IP address and browser fingerprint.

Server-side tracking has been around for a while (indeed this article is dated Nov 15, 2020; and of course, you could argue simply parsing your Apache/nginx logs to get visitor stats has existed forever). The article I think conflates several different pieces.

There's probably a few actual use cases marketers may care about for tagging/tracking/analytics:

1. Simplest: I want to know how many people use my site/app, how many come back, how many are real (not bots), which pages are popular, etc. I'd like to see all this in a nice UI where I can cut and filter the data.

2. Same as #1, but I'd like to do it across devices. Still all within my own site/app, but simply connecting a non-logged in session across desktop and mobile web. Google and FB probably have the largest available dataset on this.

3. I'd like to enrich all this information with data from other sources, for example to target ads, serve ads, etc.

Site owners/marketers then try and tackle these in a few ways, the first 3 equally bad:

1. Just dump a bunch of scripts into your site (GA, FB, Segment, whatever). Pros: easy. Cons: very easily blocked, so your data is super biased.

2. Self host some of these scripts, or CNAME them. Pros: maybe a bit better for performance? Cons: still rather easily blocked with content signatures etc. A nightmare to ensure consistency if self-hosting.

3. Run your own JS that sends events to your server, and then your server fans out to whomever. Pros: much harder to block, and likely quite performant. Cons: its unlikely your self built lib is going to give all the same 'features' as GA (features meaning device fingerprinting and so on).

4. Just get everything from HTTP logs. Pros: very performant, can't be blocked. Cons: much more limited data to work with.

Personally, I think #4 is the future (and also where we started 20 years ago). What I don't think anyone is doing yet is relaying that data out to all the other parts of the stack: GA, FB, Mixpanel, whatever. If you could solve both - giving users privacy and performance and giving marketers the same tools they're used to - sounds like a win. You might argue "well we'd be missing a bunch of user data", but you're already missing it with adblockers and iOS privacy features.

I use Firefox containers but my Firefox is locked down too tight for online shopping so I use a different browser for making purchases.