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Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)
141–150 of 902 posts
Re: Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do what? Record who came in and out of your house?
Imagine if Google offered a retail solution advertised as “record who came in and out of your house”. They would offer a CCTV for free and run centralized face recognition on everybody visiting. They’d give you a bit of stats, but truly they would aggregate data on where people go and build shadow profiles (supposedly to facilitate ad targeting). And imagine 90% of households were using it.
So this is only a problem if the person thinking of visiting their neighbors' or friends' house has an issue with it. Why can't I install such a system if I want to? Why does it matter that 90% of households use this system?
In fact, because 90% of households use this system, doesn't that mean society at large agrees that this is an OK thing to have? We all opt for wearing clothes only because society at large has agreed that wearing clothes is a requirement; there is no law of nature mandating this, and select small groups of people congregate in nudist colonies to escape from this societal requirement. Even on the non-private side, if I don't like clothes, why should I be forced to enter government buildings (for official government business such as court appearances) with them on? Surely society shouldn't be forced to make accomodations for me, just because I have a different opinion on these topics. If 90% of households did in fact use such a system, it would be the new normal because it's a nearly universal collective opinion on the technology. A society almost never caters to those that are the ultra-minority if it inconveniences the 90% or directly challenges the 90%'s own freedoms and choices when it comes to their lives, especially when that's in regards to something as low-impact as what sort of privacy visitors to a residence have while on that property.
Re: Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think in the short-term the strategy is this from the article: > Or ... block all the IP addresses of Google App Engine, at the risk of blocking many applications. having nothing to do with tracking. Anyone hosting legitimate apps in the Google ecosystsm is indirectly complicit in this and at least for my personal network, I have no concern with blocking Google App Engine holistically. Additionally, I think it's im…
I have no concern with blocking Google App Engine holistically Unfortunately, it seems that more and more government web sites rely on Google services to function. And there's no replacement for those.
How can it be legal for a government to make increasingly core services depend on these amoral, for profit monsters?
Re: Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do what? Record who came in and out of your house?
Imagine if Google offered a retail solution advertised as “record who came in and out of your house”. They would offer a CCTV for free and run centralized face recognition on everybody visiting. They’d give you a bit of stats, but truly they would aggregate data on where people go and build shadow profiles (supposedly to facilitate ad targeting). And imagine 90% of households were using it.
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Re: Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do what? Record who came in and out of your house?
Bad analogy. It's more like Target, Walmart, and Best Buy recording everything you do in the store (where your eyes go, what you say to your spouse, etc.) and then selling that information to random companies you've never interacted with , including each other. Together, they can create a comprehensive log of everything you do outside (and inside!) your house and secretly sell it. This isn't even an analogy. With Ale…
Why does selling the data matter? If it's fine to collect but not sell it, people would already be fine with Google Ads tracking as Google is solely in possession of that data and will never sell it, lest their competitors gain an edge by out-header-bidding Google (offering higher profit margins to sites) with Google's own user data.
Re: Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do what? Record who came in and out of your house?
Imagine if Google offered a retail solution advertised as “record who came in and out of your house”. They would offer a CCTV for free and run centralized face recognition on everybody visiting. They’d give you a bit of stats, but truly they would aggregate data on where people go and build shadow profiles (supposedly to facilitate ad targeting). And imagine 90% of households were using it.
That's not even the half of it. It's not only building a record of who came in and out, but what they did, where they went, what or who they "engaged" with in the house, and arbitrarily more granular information. And the person visiting your house, on average, has no clue any of this is happening.
Re: Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)
#147Citing adblock feels like clickbait. Google Tag Manager can't run ads so I don't follow the comparison. Marketing analytics could always side-step anti-adblocking tools through server-side tracking.
Right. Everything in the article is wrong. GTM is still GTM and can be trivially blocked; the container itself isn't moving server-side. It's just gained the ability to proxy data to third parties instead of needing to load scripts for every tracker. This is better for performance, and should be explicitly in control of exactly what data is passed on to where. All you really lose is the ability to block a subset of a…
How are you going to block it "trivially" if you don't know which script to block? They recommend changing the name of the GTM script, and paired with changing the content slightly, you won't be able to tell which script is GTM and which is actually important to the functioning of the site.
Re: Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)
#148The only reasonable way to interact with the modern web is to disable everything by default including images, cookies, CSS, JavaScript, video, frames etc and then develop strategies for interacting with each website. Either in the browser or in reimplemented frontends like nitter/bibliogram or externally using things like yt-dlp, gallery-dl, woob etc. Edit: oh and only contact the web via Apple private relay or Tor e…
I completely agree, most of the Major Websites (TM) are as user-hostile as it gets. But, the "bypasses" (to try to encircle all approaches with a single term) would require constant vigilance and updates, the ever-lasting game of cat & mouse, not to mention possibility of lawsuits or other shenanigans by the said Websites.
Honestly, I'd donate certain amount every month and support the effort, if it was a very wide-service/website encompassing, and would give logical end-user easily/very customizable behaviours within options, easy for the everyday Joes, and that it wouldn't treat its power users as garbage.
And here's an idea for a starting recipe for every website: a library of set of actions that would run on the first visit and would result in decline/block for each and every cookie category and "partner" (and no, there is no such thing as "legitimate uses", GTFO), since most websites either roll their own ot customize some existing solutions (from what I see), but usually invert/dark pattern options and choices to a certain degree (usually "to hell").
Re: Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)
#149All this is doing is redirecting data you already submitted to a website to Google?
I don't see any of this as particularly new or revolutionary. Except the implementation, user data was already being hoovered up.
Now it's just pipelined better.
if you were worried about your data, you have to stop submitting the data to websites. Period.
Re: Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do what? Record who came in and out of your house?
> Do what? All of the things that these companies do to monitor and track as much of the population as they can. What I'm saying is it's funny because it's one of those things that's apparently legal to do in the aggregate but not individually? Imagine if someone started up a business to track Google employees.
Man, that's a great idea
Hire a bunch of PIs to follow and publicly report on all the movements and actions of every exec you can manage at Google, Facebook, and smaller/shadier ad companies