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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)

#441

Post by estrai »

dessant wrote: post #397
peoplefromibiza wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It always saddens me to see EU citizens talk in absolutes like that. Unfortunate there are many European enemies of the EU. It doesn't even have anything to do with EU administration: EU can't prevent Google trying to trick users into leaking their privates data and habits. Not at least until Google reveals their plans on how they're gonna do it. On a final note: we accepted two non-democratic countries in EU, Pola…

> we accepted two non-democratic countries in EU, Poland and Hungary, and these are the results. I can't speak for Poland, but the political landscape of Hungary was different when it joined the EU, and the country was by no means considered non-democratic or EU-skeptic. > They infected all the other countries The EU was infected by rising inequality and the degradation of purchasing power by the middle class, which…

Poland's political landscape has also changed since they joined the EU, perhaps in a less spectacular way than in Hungary. Both countries are democracies, current leaders were elected in democratic elections. It's the adherence to the rule of law that's an issue in both cases.

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

#442

Post by manigandham »

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…

Any website can ingest data and then pass it off to another 3rd party. This has been possible since the dawn of the internet and very common. There is absolutely nothing new here.

The technical workings of how data is collected on websites is completely orthogonal to legal doctrine that protects user privacy.

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

#443

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

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.

That's true, but EU governance is byzantine to say the least. I realise that this is a political necessity, but at some point people have to understand that we're losing a majority of the benefits while increasing costs in having such a cumbersome arrangement.

Maybe with Russia being so aggressive people will realise unity and cooperation should be a priority.

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

#444

Post by dontlaugh »

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 that it's not ineffectual. It's very effective at imposing austerity, privatisation and deregulation, especially on the periphery countries. It's also effective at encouraging foreign ownership of industry and exploitation of migrants.

On occasion, the EU does something that is accidentally useful to most people. But in general, it's bad for all workers and even businesses of the periphery countries.

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

#445

Post by hyperman1 »

nickpp wrote: post #425
mhoad wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This pops up regularly, but AFAIK it's not correct. The law is much more fine grained than the USA PII concept. IP addresses are only personal data (PD) if you are capable of using them as identification mechanism. If you don't they are not. This also means that something that is not PD for you, can become PD when you give it to someone else. Or that 2 items which are not PD themselves, become PD when you combine them. Or that being hacked turns non-PD into PD.

Even as PD, using IP addresses to maintain a website is fine, even without consent. Using them to track individuals is not fine. Having a log rotation policy and a sane security policy so you can demonstrate when you throw them away is a good idea.

To be short: Install debian, drop nginx on it, then let it log as it wants. This is legal. But don't you dare mine the logs for abusing PD.

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

#446

Post by cameronh90 »

krageon wrote: post #402
ThalesX wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most often such comments come from eastern parts of Europe, where nationalistic movements have a nice resurgence in past few years. I wish people would stop attributing our attitude to nationalistic resurgences. I’m a globalist and think nationalism and regionalism should be relics of the past and I keep getting put in the same box as nationalists because I am Euro-realist. With this frame of mind I think the EU po…

> Euro-realist It's not realism to believe the EU can't exist within or facilitate your idealised frame of reference (assuming it makes sense and is something people should want), it's just negativity. > I wish people would stop attributing our attitude to nationalistic resurgences. Quite frankly nationalistic resurgence is the #1 indicator for "euro realism", so this is a very reasonable stance to take.

Before the whole brexit issue, even most ardent EU supporters would admit that the institution was terribly dysfunctional and would need to be reinvented to survive the next few decades.

The Brexit debate seems to have polarised the whole issue into either you hate the EU and everything it stands for, or you think the EU is perfect and if it wasn't for these damn national governments then we could live in utopia.

Unfortunately my country is no longer part of this project, but I hope that pro-EU people take on board some of the valid criticism of the institution and make the necessary changes. Otherwise, what happened here will inevitably happen elsewhere.

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

#447

Post by thinkingemote »

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #440
ComodoHacker wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't exactly this behavior create echo chambers and lead to polarization?

I usually do read the linked content but I agree with GP poster that comments are often more informative. Yes there is sometimes an echo chamber here, but it's only for limited topics. It very much has a Silicon Valley feel to it, but @dang and I have gone around on this and he assures us that the readership and comments have broad geographic representation.[1] It's a worldwide echo chamber. :) Fortunately the echo c…

The time of the day is reflective of broad geography, generally.

So some UK or EU specific topics will appear, be commented upon but then disappear later in the day.

It would be interesting to see what kind of topics are commented on from different places.

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

#448

Post by strogonoff »

themacguffinman wrote: post #421
Teever wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peop…

Individual businesses aren’t stalking anyone if their CCTVs are watching out for themselves. But as soon as there is a centralized company offering the service and gobbling all the data, and that company acts like Google does with regards to web tracking, then it’d be in some sense no better than stalking (or even worse, stalking at scale).

If it only obtains the data to provide you the service of knowing who comes in or out, and deletes the data as soon as it’s not needed anymore, there would be no question; but that’s not where profit is in a double-sided market.

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

#449

Post by aembleton »

gigel82 wrote: post #82
tasha0663 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a fine suggestion. If it breaks the site, then I'd call that a broken website and move on. Maybe next time someone points me there, they'll have fixed their critical issue for users who block tracking proxies. I'm okay with not being in the target audience of sites that really want to do this. I've got enough other things to do at less hostile places that my FOMO isn't triggered in the least.

How do you identify tracking proxies though? When everything is going through the same domain you don't even know if data is being sent to Google, it's all a server-side black box.

By using Cname uncloaking that uBlockOrigin can do on Firefox. It should see that the real domain is Google Tag Manager.

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

#450

Post by aembleton »

xigoi wrote: post #258
inlined wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the solution will be for ad blockers to invest in neural nets to detect the graph of the code flow for known variants of the script. The software that detects plagiarism will be a good start.

That sounds like it's going to be slower than not using an ad blocker at all.

Not if the signatures are uploaded and shared.
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