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

311–320 of 902 posts

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

#311

Post by ornornor »

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?

Couldn’t be further from reality.

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

#312

Post by danuker »

simongray wrote: post #302
chickenimprint wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

This is more of a workaround.

A solution to a poliical problem is political, not technical.

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

#313

Post by Quai »

kibibu wrote: post #52
quicklime wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe using an archive.is-like service that renders the static page (as an image at the extreme) A lot of companies are starting to use "browser isolation" which is essentially what you're saying. A proxy runs between the client and the server, but it does more than just direct TLS streams - it actually builds the DOM and executes the JS. The resulting web page is sent to the actual client browser, which might send…

Opera Mobile has been doing this for years and years

The Opera product you are thinking of is Opera Mini. Opera Mobile is a browser running mostly on your device (except for "turbo" which optimized media trough a proxy setup, but did not, afaik, execute any of the javascript).

Opera Mini can be looked at as a browser running in the cloud, sending OBML (Opera Binary Markup Language, if I remember correctly) causing the (very thin) client to draw things on the mobile screen, like text, images, etc without having to transfer, parse, execute, flow and paint every thing on the device.

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

#314

Post by KronisLV »

simongray wrote: post #302
chickenimprint wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Those are (nice) solutions to a problem that shouldn't be allowed to (legally) exist. The industry shouldn't be allowed to play clever with the ways to coerce their users into giving up their information just because they know that most of those users are not interested in navigating difficult dialogs.

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

#315

Post by mderazon »

hilbert42 wrote: post #47
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…

"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." By default, I don't run JavaScript. I don't see blocking JS as a problem - in fact, it's a blessing as the web is blinding fast without it - and also most of the ads just simply disappear if JS is not running. On occasions when I need JS (only about 3-5% of sites)…

I don't know which web you're viewing that only needs JS for 3-5% of websites

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

#316

Post by wjnc »

CommanderData wrote: post #250
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.

GDPR has been a massive win for user/consumer rights. Its a piece of legislation law makers in the US are trying to mimic. Surprisingly the UK are trying to rid or weaken GDPR significantly after brexit. The only way to fix this problem now is through strong legislation.

Do we really need more or new legislation if there is still ample room for improvement on the enforcement side of GDPR. Just a not so far stretch: all or most of the GDPR supervisors now think Google Analytics is a no-go. Publish this and an intention to fine say 2% of revenue, set an expiration date six months ahead and do a EU-tender for a scraping facility finding all users of Google Analytics. Then in six months, re-scrape and send out the fines. Rinse and repeat.

Google Tag Manager could be declared illegal on the outset, with a 5 to 10% fine for Google if they continue to offer it in the EU. Do a top-down assessment of the usage of Google Tag Manager in the largest e-commerce users in Europe. Fine them as well. At the end of the day privacy enforcement could easily pay for itself.

(Edit: After typing this I think you were writing from a US perspective. I think GDPR is a big win as well, but enforcement is feeble ;)

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

#317

Post by boudin »

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?

Don't blame the lawmaker for the bad behaviour of people who are trying to bypass it... If you're on such website, you know that the website itself shouldn't be trusted.

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

#318

Post by Teever »

iptq wrote: post #156
strogonoff wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't this literally what Ring does?

Yeah and isn't this stalking?

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

#319

Post by hilbert42 »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #136
heavyset_go wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By default, I don't run JavaScript. I don't see blocking JS as a problem - in fact, it's a blessing as the web is blinding fast without it - and also most of the ads just simply disappear if JS is not running. Years ago I was on the "people who block JavaScript are crazy" bandwagon, until just loading a single news article online meant waiting for a dozen ads and autoplaying videos to load. I spent more time waitin…

Tried NoScript for years and it was a pain. Too many of the sites I use need so many domains full of JS. So I think this will vary widely depending on the person and their preferred/needed sites.

It has to be said: there are people who can get by without JavaScript and those who can't. You can almost predict those who can and those who can't by their personality.

If you are heavy user of Google's services, Twitter and Facebook as well as many big news outlets and heavy-duty commercial sites then you're the 'JavaScript' type and stopping scripts is definitely not for you!

If you are like me and don't have any Facebook, Twitter or Google accounts and deliberately avoid large commercial sites like, say, Microsoft then you can happily switch off JavaScript and experience the 'better' web.

You know the type of person you are, so with this fact in mind there's no point me proselytizing the case for disabling JavaScript.

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

#320

Post by Arnavion »

Semaphor wrote: post #199
Arnavion wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have the features of uMatrix with uBlock Origin's static rules. You just have to write them by hand instead of the convenient table UI. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26284124 The only thing that uBO doesn't support is controlling cookie access, so I still use uM for that.

> You just have to write them by hand instead of the convenient table UI. That’s a pretty big "just", though. Very few sites work without fiddling with rules, having to do manual text entry every time would push me towards not using it. The UI of uMatrix is generally far superior to the mobile-friendly, simplified one of uBo.

>That’s a pretty big "just", though.

It is, but for me the pros outweigh the cons. In particular, even with uM I often ended up editing the rules by hand because it was easier to copy-paste and turn on and off rules for experimenting, but uM would forcibly resort the rules on save which made that annoying.

>Very few sites work without fiddling with rules,

The only sites I fiddle with the rules of are the ones I visit regularly, which is not many. Over the 1.5 years that I've been using this method, I've only got 75 "web properties" in my list (github.com, github.io and githubusercontent.com count as one "GitHub" web property; so the number of domains is a bit higher). Going by git history, I do have to fiddle with one or more rules once a month on average.

For other sites, either they work well enough with default settings, or I give up and close them, or if I really need to know what they say I use a different browser. For this other browser I never log in to anything, and have it configured to delete all history by default on exit. (I've been pondering making this an X-forwarded browser running on a different source IP, but haven't bothered.)

>The UI of uMatrix is generally far superior to the mobile-friendly, simplified one of uBo.

To be clear, editing the rules does not use the "mobile-friendly, simplified" uBO UI. It refers to the giant text field you see in the uBO "Dashboard", specifically the "My filters" tab.

But yes, it'd be the best of all worlds if uBO gains the table UI as an alternative to the filters textfield. I imagine the problem is that static filters are technically much more powerful than what the uM-style rules do, so it'd require inventing a third kind of rule, which isn't great.

Post reply on HN