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

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

#291

Post by chickenimprint »

ornornor wrote: post #235
zwaps wrote: post #228

Crazy how evil Google is. Just wow. Since this runs entirely on the domain of the website, it can easily ignore your privacy rights, with Google more or less washing their hands clean of it. Indeed, if we take blocking trackers as expression of consent, the only possible reason this exists at all is to illegally circumvent privacy preferences. In other words, if you work for Google, you are literally working for a cr…

> privacy rights given to us by law (eg in the EU) > As a EU citizen, i hope that our ineffectual administration at least tries to fight this somehow. Of course, there is little hope. GDPR is thanks to the EU and I wouldn’t say it has no effect. It seems like you’re contradicting yourself with these two paragraphs.

Is it safe to assume you've never had to deal with those downright malevolent dark patterns and button labyrinths, designed to make it extremely unlikely for anyone in the general population to actually reject tracking?

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

#292

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

Stupid question: What value, if any, does "Google Tag Manager" offer the end user? By "end user" I do not mean website operator or advertiser.

I never ran this stuff. There is no Javascript engine available, there is no DNS and the local forwarding proxy does not forward traffic to Google domains. I am not asleep at the wheel and probably not the target end user. But I always wondered why any end user would want to allow this garbage, assuming they exercised a conscious choice.

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

#293

Post by ComodoHacker »

xigoi wrote: post #264
volderette wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not how GTM server side works. There is not a single call to Google domains from the client, when GTM server side is set up to its fullest. The config (gtm.js) will be loaded from my subdomain and not googletagmanager.com. Also gtm.js can be renamed.

Couldn't you still recognize the script by its content?

Not with dynamic obfuscation.

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

#295

Post by andirk »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #292

Stupid question: What value, if any, does "Google Tag Manager" offer the end user? By "end user" I do not mean website operator or advertiser. I never ran this stuff. There is no Javascript engine available, there is no DNS and the local forwarding proxy does not forward traffic to Google domains. I am not asleep at the wheel and probably not the target end user. But I always wondered why any end user would want to a…

Google Tag Manager data can be used to optimize your recommendation engine. It can help with Google Ads as well. It is a 3rd party handling some precious and maybe private data, but it has a low barrier of entry.

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

#296

Post by Zerverus »

notriddle wrote: post #108
bo1024 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is a solution, since modern fingerprinting methods go far, far beyond IP address.

Apple Private Relay runs on iDevices, which are almost all identical.

Not to current fingerprinting methods, they are not.

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

#297

Post by shafyy »

xigoi wrote: post #264
volderette wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not how GTM server side works. There is not a single call to Google domains from the client, when GTM server side is set up to its fullest. The config (gtm.js) will be loaded from my subdomain and not googletagmanager.com. Also gtm.js can be renamed.

Couldn't you still recognize the script by its content?

Exactly, this is already done for tracking scripts, since it's commong to use proxies to load tracking scripts.

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

#299

Post by cookiengineer »

gigel82 wrote: post #25

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…

> 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.

I'm building a peer-to-peer network of Web Browsers [1] that doesn't trust anything by default, and only allows to render types of content incrementally; while disabling JS completely. Most of the time, you can find out what the content is with heuristics. The crappy occasional web apps that don't work without JS can be rendered temporarily in an isolated sandbox in /tmp anyways.

I think that the only way to get ahead of the adblocking game is to instead of maintaining blocklists, we need to move to a system that has allowlists for content. The user has to be able to decide whether they're expecting a website serving a video, or whether the expectation is to get text content, image content, audio content etc. News websites are the prime example of how "wrong" ads can get. Autoplayed videos, dozens of popups, flashing advertisements and I haven't even had time to read a single paragraph of the article.

And to get ahead of the "if fanboy gets hit by the bus" problem... we need to crowdsource this kind of meta information in a decentralized and distributed manner.

[1] https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth

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

#300

Post by shafyy »

seandoe wrote: post #89
whalesalad wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google tag manager in my experience is a script executed by the browser. Then it installs itself in the page and performs the inner payload of user script insertions. It’s a Trojan horse, really. You can block Google tag manager’s embed scripts. I wasn’t aware of a backend integration but it’s certainly possible. Regardless, I use a DNS based ad blocker (pihole) and it takes care of all this stuff. I occasionally nee…

You missed the same domain part. How are you going to block a request when you don't know the url?

You check the loaded script itself to see if it matches an expected pattern.
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