Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

chromium.woolyss.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 902 posts

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

#301

Post by janpot »

sdoering wrote: post #244

Disclaimer: I am a data analyst. I consult companies in regards to ethical data collection. But I also know of black sheep. I don't have a problem with websites measuring what I view, click, add to cart or buy. I want them to be able to see what doesn't work in terms of user experience. And if they do marketing I even want them to be able to see from which source of traffic (aka marketing effort) how many conversions…

> I want them to be able to see what doesn't work in terms of user experience.

That's not what they're doing, at all. They want to be able to see what doesn't work in terms of maximising profits. That may correlate with good user experience sometimes, but more often it results in the opposite.

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

#302

Post by simongray »

chickenimprint wrote: post #291
ornornor wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

There are solutions to most of that, e.g. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/consent-o-matic/md...

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

#303

Post by HHC-Hunter »

antifarben wrote: post #246

Actually this article strengthens my believe that adblockers will even become more essential. I mean, even if the server decides to send some ads, the client doesn't have to show them. Or am I missing something?

Not sure where you got that from the article, in-fact I get the inverse.

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

#304

Post by gizzlon »

probotect0r wrote: post #147
coffeefirst wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If it's 99.99% the same I think we will manage :)

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

#306

Post by ohgodplsno »

chickenimprint wrote: post #291
ornornor wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Those patterns are more and more being punished by GDPR enforcement. Companies may try playing around the letter of the law, but Europe runs pretty solidly on the spirit of the law. See events like these: https://www.iccl.ie/news/gdpr-enforcer-rules-that-iab-europe...

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

#307

Post by prox »

dxdm wrote: post #289
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…

> our ineffectual administration It always saddens me to see EU citizens talk in absolutes like that. With some exceptions, and by comparison, we have some of the best governments in the world, and, for all its faults, the EU has been a huge net positive. Perpetuating these overly negative stereotypes just aids populists in replacing our good governance with the other kind that we see all over the world.

I agree. I understand people like to talk in this way to show their emotional connection to the topic, but it’s not very helpful and like you mention, too absolute.

It’s a system in progress, and we need to be invested in its ideals (fair, just, democratic)

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

#308

Post by samwillis »

I run a B2C e-commerce business, and want to offer a little insight into this from the other side.

Advertising online has changes a lot over the last ten years, I don’t believe advertisers are particularly happy about it.

On Google we almost exclusively just to search result page advertising, very little display network and re-marketing. My comment here is about search result place adverts, with is where Google started and why they are so successful.

As an advertiser search result page as arising is amazing, you are paying to get you product in front of people you pretty sure are already looking for it or something like it. When it works it’s magic.

Ten years ago when we stated it was super simple, you would bid individually on keywords that people are searching for, and the tracking on your site was only about attributing advert clicks to conversions for reporting. There was no (or very little) data mining and profile building, at least from my perspective as an advertiser.

Then came the “shopping ads”, you upload a list of your products and google decided when to show them with their magical ML/AI. As an advertiser you could only use “negative keywords” . Gone was the ability to control properly when your ad was shown.

The latest is “smart shopping ads”, it’s a great big magic black box, and all advertisers are bing agreeably pushed towards it, all calls with google advisors are basically sales calls push it on you. Advertisers have basically no control of when their ad is shown, it’s all down to AI/ML. They have also folded the display network and re-marketing into this, you can’t turn that bit off.

I am pretty sure the old keyword bidding is on its way out will not be available in a few years.

In order for all these new ML based advertising work we have to send google a lot of data, there is no option. They know everything about your business, all revenue numbers, they no exactly how much every business that uses their advertising is making. The level of “spying” on advertisers is frankly amazing, I wish it wasn’t necessary, just as I wish I wasn’t being spied on as a user.

Google have made a rot for their own back, they need this data for the ads to work and advertisers have no choice. I believe part of the problem is that the old style keyword bugging relied on advertisers being able to see what peoples search terms were, due to GDPR I think this is no longer possible and so they have to go the ML route.

I long for going back to super simple search ads with just simple attribution.

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

#309

Post by octoberfranklin »

Folks, this stuff only works because of browser fingerprinting.

Google couldn't do this before, because letting the ad-displaying website sit between them and the user meant the websites could defraud google like crazy.

This idea isn't new. What's new is that browser fingerprinting got good enough that google can catch fraudful customers by sending fingerprinting scripts through their proxy and watching what comes back.

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

#310

Post by cbvlkjerna »

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…

It's based on JS. There's your solution. I disabled JS in the browser for nearly 2 decades and I can still use most of the web (HN included).

You are blind to the solution because you don't want to take responsibility for your own browsing. You and people like you won't change, will whine about how nothing can be done while not being prepared to understand the problem is yourself and that's where the solution lies as well. When google screws you over, remember you chose that (maybe by omission rather than commission, but you chose).

Post reply on HN