TLDR
I'm fine without JavaScript? I've the impression that JavaScript is worse than ever assumed during early 2000s. I don't criticize the language it is the actual usage scenario which was bad for people and got even worse. Web 3.0 should be server side again with interactive code at all in browser. No interpreter on your computer should ever execute foreign code.
Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)
471–480 of 902 posts
Re: Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)
#472Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
These laws do not ban businesses, they ban business practices. And consumers often win. E.g. laws to ban the business practice of just dumping toxic waste into rivers because it's cheaper were hugely successful - at least in places were they were enforced. On the other hand, there is a danger of regulatory capture, which has to be considered as well...
The GDPR does not ban Google, and it does not ban analytics. But, according to recent court rulings, it bans the business practice of Google Analytics to collect and transfer data to the US - which isn't considered to be a place with "adequate" privacy laws - and other places without prior user consent. Google could potentially come up with ways to make a Google Analytics that does abide by the law, but so far they choose not to. Maybe the changes that would be required would cut severely into revenues, or even make (free) GA cost-prohibitive, but this is in line with environmental protections killing off certain products/businesses that got too expensive when they had to dispose of their toxic waste properly and in a way that doesn't poison people and the environment.
Re: Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)
#473Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did it really make the world a better place? Most sites collect as much data as ever, but now we need many more clicks, and can't have nice things like photos from kindergarden parties anymore.
The GDPR applies to everything outside of purely personal/household activities - it's not limited to websites.
Yes, hence the issue with photographs of events of our children.
I'm not convinced yet it is a net positive. For sure it increased senseless bureaucracy by a huge margin (not just the clicks on web sites, it creates more work in other places, too).
The real players collect just as much data as before, but private people can't do most basic things anymore.
Re: Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)
#474Disclaimer: 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…
> not done in the way GTM does (only hosting on Google, using an A/AAAA subdomain, grabbing every cookie possibly and so on).
It’s provided as a Docker image that you can run anywhere you want.
https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/tag-manager/serve...
Re: Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)
#475Crazy 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…
What is their means to correlate users between sites, though? On IPv6, the IP itself is often enough (or IP+Browser/OS version).
Currently, at home, I’m behind a CG/NAT (and with a somewhat fingerprint resistant setup - rotating user agent, blocked canvas, a few other things). What would they use to correlate my identity across sites, when there’s no common “google.com” cookie to anchor against?
Re: Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)
#476wow. insane.
Re: Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)
#477God 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 co-develop an open source firewall for Android, which most of our users use for ad-blocking purposes. The community has known about server-side collection for quite sometime now. You could run Google Analytics on any of the serverless environments since a year or two ago (I noted this on news.yc a year back [0][1]). Tag Manager server-side is Google throwing its own solution in to the mix. DNS based content blockin…
> This isn't the end-game: I fully expect that IP address blocklists would crop up in no time, and will be painfully maintained by folks pouring their life in to it.
Proxy can be hosted on the same server as the site itself. In that case this simply becomes a blocklist of naughty websites. Someone still needs to do the hard work of figuring out which sites are naughty.
Re: Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)
#478Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know which web you're viewing that only needs JS for 3-5% of websites
Read my reply to paulryanrogers about whether one's a JavaScript or a non-JavaScript type person. The 3-5% of sites I'm referring to are ones where I have to enable JS to view them. In by far the vast majority of the sites that I frequent I do not have to enable JS to view them. Also note my reply to forgotmypw17, one doesn't need JS if one avoids low quality dross.
I will give it another shot.
Unfortunately though, this does not solve the server-side GTM issue, right ?
If the 3-5% of the website you use will start tracking via server-side GTM with the site's domain, you will not be able to simply use noscript to disable tracking ?
Re: Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)
#479There is nothing new about this at all. Websites can collect data and forward it on the backend since the dawn of the internet. Google Analytics has an HTTP API [1] for sending events that's used by plenty of large sites. Consolidating event collection and forwarding to various sources is a large SaaS category with several billion-dollar companies, and one of the biggest success stories is Segment from YC [2].
In past adblocking discussions, many users mentioned that they were fine with ads if they were served by the 1st party without data leakage, but the entire issue is that 1st-party on a technical basis has no bearing on the custody and access of the data itself. The only serious way to protect privacy is through legal doctrine that regulates collection and sharing. Browser-based adblockers were always a short-term technical bandaid to a much broader surveillance problem, but the real solutions take much more work.
1. https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection... 2. https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/segment
Re: Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)
#480Crazy 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…
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