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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)

#421

Post by themacguffinman »

Teever wrote: post #318
iptq wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this literally what Ring does?

Yeah and isn't this stalking?

You think installing cameras on your own property is stalking? Putting aside that this is legal nonsense, are you saying that the millions of private retail stores, offices, and houses that install security cameras are actually stalking and the majority of citizens that visit grocery stores are stalking victims?

I mean, maybe you do believe that, but it's a little ridiculous to freak out over something that most people do and are used to. At most, it's an extension of the status quo.

Edit: I suppose it's not that ridiculous if you think most of the world is evil, but I am genuinely curious if you believe that.

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

#422

Post by nickpp »

mtsr wrote: post #259
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 think the solution here is a technical one. This should just be solved by legislation. Google Analytics has been recently ruled illegal in multiple European countries. And either this already is illegal under the same laws or it should be made so.

When you use laws to ban businesses from other countries, those countries will feel entitled to use laws to ban businesses for your countries as well.

It's how protectionism works and it's generally the consumers who lose.

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

#423

Post by formerly_proven »

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?

I some cases the "people do illegal things regardless" argument can hold some water, but that's not the case for the GDPR, which is worded very clearly and hence it's really obvious that this kind of thing violates it.

Most of these banners violate the GDPR even before they're showing up, because the GDPR actually restricts your ability to embed non-first-party content without consent. That's why Google Fonts violates the GDPR, for example. Arguably every vanilla Wordpress install violates the GDPR because Wordpress embeds something from s.w.org on every page (presumably for install count / analytics reasons).

This kinda sounds like a bad thing but it's not. It's actually a huge boon, because it's an excellent legal excuse to get rid of embedding stuff from 213789 origins and CDNs, which only has negative performance effects since caches have been origin-segregated for years, meaning that even if another page uses the same jQuery version from cdnjs, it will be downloaded again anyway.

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

#425

Post by nickpp »

mhoad wrote: post #393
mtsr wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ruling against google analytics in France is quite simple: google analytics as used by an unnamed website was not compliant with GDPR, because it exports user data to a country that has privacy laws that are not up to GDPR standards, which is not allowed. This is on the unnamed website and they or compelled to stop this illegal export of user data by either only exporting anonymized statistics or stopping use of…

But this actually highlights exactly what I mean. What if I simply stood up a plain old Apache server to host my website but that happened to be hosted in the US. No analytics, just a few HTML files and that’s it. I’m still in this scenario sending PII of EU citizens in the form of IP addresses to the US which are just written to /var/log/apache It seems obviously different and yet as that ruling seems to imply it wo…

Default configurations of logging on most servers is illegal now under GDPR since it saves IP addresses.

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

#426

Post by _flux »

jacquesm wrote: post #282
probotect0r wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You'll know that after loading the first couple of bytes though.

So they need to change the first couple bytes then, automatically.

Essentially I don't understand how possibly could free adblocking lists defeat advertisers or trackers if they truly cared about them: simply have a system running with the latest adblock lists against their test site, and if it is able to filter them, have an engineer make a modification—or have the system automatically pull up a pre-made modification or even generate a new one. In addition, the content-driving JS and the site JS could be bundled in one and obfuscated.

Best functioning filters are secret ones and thus only the technically minded minority has access to them.

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

#427

Post by mixedbit »

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…

There is a hope this can be blocked with adblockers inspecting payload of requests and blocking based on some generic properties that could be always present in Google Tag Manager requests to proxies. Unless this mechanism has some dedicated Chrome-level support that would disallow inspecting or blocking these requests.

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

#428

Post by rvanlaar »

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…

You're hitting the nail on the head. I'm not against the website owners seeing what I do on their website.

What I am against is what other parties are able to do with the data when sold. They're able to correlate website visits with specific businesses and linkedin profiles.

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

#429

Post by _flux »

bruce343434 wrote: post #345
dartharva wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The client won't be able to distinguish between ads and actual content on the website if both come from the same source.

machine learning to the rescue!

As long as the countermeasures are public, the advertisers can also automatically react to them, if they put enough effort in it e.g. in the form of preparing alternatives ahead of time.

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

#430

Post by tremon »

saiya-jin wrote: post #359
prox wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Most often such comments come from eastern parts of Europe, where nationalistic movements have a nice resurgence in past few years. A prime example is Czech republic, a very euro-skeptical nation despite all the benefits it brought them. Hungary would be another one. That being said, as somebody coming from east too and seeing clearly all the direct and indirect benefits of EU, its far from ideal. The whole concept o…

As if England didn't broadcast its share of fact-free euro-skeptical gaslighting all over Europe. As if their voice wasn't echoed by both PVV and FVD in The Netherlands, FN in France, AFD in Germany or M5S in Italy.
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