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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)

#461

Post by nickpp »

hyperman1 wrote: post #445
nickpp wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

Do you have a source? My observation came from multiple lawyers in the context of "to stay on the safe side".

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

#462

Post by beagle3 »

gigel82 wrote: post #72
tootie wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Endgame" is the way all web analytics was done 20 years ago.

The server-side "analytics" of 20 years ago was for aggregate reports on popular pages, number of users, their browsers and OSs and maybe their geo-location; solely for the use of the site owners to optimize and whatnot. This abomination Google is proposing is unblockable cross-site tracking of people's activities. That site owners get to see some of that data too is insignificant, their value comes from being able t…

How does google correlate identifiers between different users?

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

#463

Post by perlgeek »

For a pretty long time I believed that many of the privacy and security issues in current tech could have (at least partial) technical solutions.

This convinces me more than ever that regulation is necessary and, in the long run, unavoidable.

Yes, GDPR rules suck for somebody who has to write software that deals with personal data, but we can no longer act as if good ad blockers would solve the problem for us.

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

#464

Post by darebak »

anhner wrote: post #431
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…

I don't think it's fair to put Poland and Hungary in that basket. It's not like they were like this when they joined the EU. They slowly drifted towards anti-EU sentiment over the years thanks to populist politicians. The same can happen to any country. The same happend to Britain.

Or they slowly drifted towards anti-EU sentiment due to the EU.

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

#466

Post by xyzal »

mixedbit wrote: post #427
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.

I think modifying some fingerprintable apis to give faked/altered results could be enough, given the global fingerprint is a product of all partial fingerprints. Some extensions already implement that, eg. https://github.com/kkapsner/CanvasBlocker/

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

#468

Post by marcosdumay »

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…

Nope. The end-game is adding the data collection into the backend frameworks so the user does not have to execute javascript at all.

But this is pretty close to it. I hope Google and anybody collaborating with them get severely punished.

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

#469

Post by Fnoord »

Quai wrote: post #313
kibibu wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 scr…

Yeah, they released countless of rebrands and versions and what not.

The equivalent on desktop would be Browsh (e.g. with terminal + Mosh), but it runs Firefox under the hood. Opera Mini is just akin to a remote browser with the result being send to the client (as a compressed picture like in RDP/VNC, or a proprietary markup language like OBML).

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

#470

Post by toyg »

cameronh90 wrote: post #446
krageon wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Unf…

> even most ardent EU supporters would admit that the institution was terribly dysfunctional

That's a mischaracterization. "Most" would have accepted that there was (and is) room for improvement, but "terribly disfunctional" is an extreme term. The view that the whole institution had to be reinvented has always been a very English idea, based on the fact that some key policies (like agricultural support) benefited other countries over Britain. Most of the continent, much more pragmatically, always understood that the EU is fundamentally a set of compromises that will continue to expand. As such, it can look confusing from a distance, but once you unpack it, the compromises actually make sense (or are the only possible way towards cooperation among such different peoples). Britain benefited hugely from infrastructure support programs, for example.

The EU has always been kept together more by the sheer will of European middle-classes at large, than by this or that particular set of rules. National governments are in a constant state of tension with something that they see as a new competitor for the absolute power they enjoyed for centuries. This will likely continue to be the case for a very long time.

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