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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)

#451

Post by andrewingram »

janpot wrote: post #301
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.

The bit you're replying to here hasn't yet introduced the problem of marketing teams.

The kind of tracking in the first section is "understanding how people use your product", and is usually introduced by the product team, rather than marketing. And most product teams i've worked on fiercely fight back against the addition of excessive tracking. Whilst the goal of a business (and therefore a product team), is usually about maximising profits, it's not exclusively about that. I've worked for businesses that literally have a social charter in their articles of association, but they still want to measure how people use their products.

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

#452

Post by sdoering »

robalni wrote: post #344
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 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. The problem is not that they measure things. The problem is that they enter the user's private area; they run code on the user's computer and probably grab information about the user too (I don't know exactly how tag managers work because I have never us…

Well actually it is more like they you are entering their store. They are measuring the number of people that come in. The number of items (and what items) these people look at. Add to their basket. How many stand in line at the cashier and how many buy. And how many filled baskets stand in the isles at the end of the day.

But - they also could write down the gender of anyone entering the shop. Or the hair color. Or they could note down the license plate of your car. With whom you arrive. The brand of your car. The color. The brands of the clothes you visibly wear.

Then they correlate that to the payment method, your Visa card, the credit ranking they receive back from visa (digitally at least). And so on.

and they measure how often you return.

They could do all of this (and actually a big lot of them does) and not only log that for themselves and do whatever analysis with it, but also send this data happily to the advertising agency that manages the big signs all over town so that they can show you additional advertisements for a new car, because you have money, but your car is old.

That is were the problem begins. It begins when doing way too invasive logging of user attributes that do only marginally have anything to do with measuring how the shop (or the website) work. And more so when this data is being sent to who knows whom in this advertising space out there.

I have no problem with an online store storing the fact that I came by clicking on a display ad. Or on an email newsletter. Or that I am using Firefox. Or Chrome. And that I am on a WIn10 desktop device. Or that I tend to add a lot of stuff to my shopping cart, wait two hours and then sort what I don't need.

I even do not have a problem showing me additional products based on what I looked at in their shop.

But to correlate that with offsite data, sending this to advertisers and so on is a no go for me.

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

#453

Post by pixeldetracking »

I'm the author, good to see this on HN, raising awareness on the topic

I don't know who made the translation and when it was made, but the original article in french (https://pixeldetracking.com/fr/google-tag-manager-server-sid...) contains more information on recent GTM "improvements"): mainly on how you can easily change JS library names and detailed instructions on how to host your container in other clouds or self-host

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

#454

Post by robtherobber »

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…

I must echo the other comments in this thread and point out the fact that this sort of generalisation does more harm than good by helping to cement one of the negative stereotypes concerning Eastern Europe (EE) (that somehow they lack the ability or the drive to work towards a more democratic society), which is also not backed by data. According to this 2019 BBC article [0] that looks at where in Europe's political landscape the right-wing nationalists hold sway, 8 out of top 10 countries are in Western Europe (WE). The UK is not on that list (nor other EE countries like Croatia for that matter), but I think it should be.

There's also a noticeable increase in right wing terrorism, which appears to take place more in WE than EE ("measured by overall volume of right-wing terrorism, Germany and Italy, the two former World War II Axis powers, lead the way"), where most targets show that the substantial majority of right-wing terrorist attacks have been aimed at immigrants and Muslims [1]. Possible explanations include the displacement of people from conflict zones like Syria and Afghanistan, but also the fact that most migrants in Europe are economic migrants, which means that they go from less economically developed countries to more developed ones, thus from EE to WE, which is why the rise of nationalism is higher in WE than EE. This, of course, is but speculation on my part, especially since countries like Hungary, Poland and Czechia have behaved rather poorly in this respect, on par with Austria, Italy and the UK.

Plenty to discuss here and there's a lot of information available, but I doubt we can simply point to EE and consider the matter closed, since this seems to be a global phenomenon.

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-36130006 [1] https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/countering-radical-right/we...

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

#455

Post by andrewingram »

deepstack wrote: post #253
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…

>The problem imho isn't GTM (Google Tagmanager) running as proxy. This would (or at least could) be a data privacy win if done ethically. At least under one imho essential condition: I could be able to run the proxy on any infrastructure that I like. Not only one Google's cloud offering. Yup that is where rubber meets the road. Would like to offer google as little data as possible. And use as little google products a…

Sibling comment shares this link, but you can run this in your own infrastructure (this is actually how Segment does server-side publishing to Google Analytics, because until very recently there hasn't been a proper API for it): https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/tag-manager/serve...

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

#456

Post by mkdirp »

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…

> This would (or at least could) be a data privacy win if done ethically.

Most, if not all, tracking is unethical.

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

#457

Post by Fnoord »

josefx wrote: post #185
quambene wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Concerning noscript, is this [1] still a thing? [1] NoScript is harmful and promotes malware - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12624000

Can't find any ads on NoScript.net with uBlock running and uniblue.com seems to have expired. However it is hilarious that the complaint comes from Ad block Plus, their entire business model is build around bypassing EasyList. For a generous fee they make sure that your ads are "acceptable".

What makes you think this comes from ABP? The article linked to is from 2016, they link to a history between NoScript and ABP. The article by ABP is from 2009 (!!). Back in the 2009, ABP was the defacto standard. There was no uBlock. There was NoScript, but no uMatrix yet.

The developer issued an apology and reverted the change, and apart from a Ghostery one (who are also shady) no further controversies are documented at [1]. Perhaps the Wikipedia article is incomplete, given the one linked is from 2016?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NoScript

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

#459

Post by KoftaBob »

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…

Wouldn't a script blocker like NoScript or uMatrix take care of this?
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