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

Like ADT? Like a lot of security companies that offer monitoring solutions on behalf of clients, especially smaller businesses and individual homeowners?

"gobbling all the data" is vaguely scary while being totally meaningless. GTM data is fully managed by the client, Google contractually does not randomly spy on it. Many businesses would argue that they do delete user data after they don't need it anymore, but analytics is useful and therefore necessary for a fairly long time (many platforms have natural retention limits, usually a few years). Google themselves deletes user data on their first party products after 18 months by default (referring to things like Web & App activity and Location history) and users can set it as low as 3 months, approximately the same amount of time as security footage.

Edited to correct a number and remove some snark

> 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 important discussions about EU are not held in English. I think a good part of the negative talk about EU in the English speaking sphere comes from English (Who have different needs than continental, or eastern Europe) talking with Americans (Who understand the EU even less).

A lot of the moderate, compromise analyzing discussions will not be perceptible in English, because it will be held in French, German, Italian, Spanish, etc...

Which behaviour would that be? The "reading only the comments, not the article"? I don't see how reading creates an echo chamber.

What creates an echo chamber is if all the posts are similar or otherwise in agreement with each other. Those threads make for boring reading and I tend to only scan them for less boring content (yes, that means I read the context surrounding greyed-out comments more than the rest). The threads where people discuss various aspects and experiences is what I come here for.

(full disclosure, I mostly read the comments before even opening the article. I only read the article if there's a high-quality comment thread about some details in the article, or if multiple commenters state that it's a great article. And I tend to upvote an article based on the quality of the comments, not just the article itself).

> Crazy how evil Google is.

And the even worse evil are the website owners who betray their own users by placing third-party trackers on their own sites.

Incorrect. In the "Breyer" ruling[0] the highest European court concluded that dynamic IP addresses are PII (not just personal data, and not just data), as there is an abstract risk that combining IP addresses with other data can lead to identification of a user. The ruling explicitly said that the mere risk of such an identification is enough, not that such an identification has to actually happen.

Subsequent rulings by many courts have found that all IP addresses are PII, for various reasons, such as "static" IP addresses bear the same risk of indirect identification, and there is no reliable way to distinguish between "dynamic" and "static" addresses anyway.

The recent German ruling that Google Fonts violates the GDPR just by transmitting an IP to google (by making the web browser fetch a resource from a google server) hammered home this point, citing the EU ruling again[0].

This is different to e.g. of a streaming provider keeping a history of songs you played. This data is personal data, but it is not personally identifiable data as this history alone cannot be used to identify a person. However, if this history has some kind of identifier attached that links back to account information or an IP address, that identifier would be PII, as this identifier could be used to indirectly identify a person.

[0] https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf;?text=&d...

[1] https://rewis.io/urteile/urteil/lhm-20-01-2022-3-o-1749320/

Die dynamische IP-Adresse stellt für einen Webseitenbetreiber ein personenbezogenes Datum dar, denn der Webseitenbetreiber verfügt abstrakt über rechtliche Mittel, die vernünftigerweise eingesetzt werden könnten, um mithilfe Dritter, und zwar der zuständigen Behörde und des Internetzugangsanbieters, die betreffende Person anhand der gespeicherten IP-Adressen bestimmen zu lassen (BGH, Urteil vom 16.05.2017 - VI ZR 135/13)[2].

Translated, best to my abilities:

The dynamic IP address is to a web site operator a piece of personally identifiable data, because the web site operator abstractly has legal means, which could be reasonably used, with the help of third parties, namely the the responsible authority and the internet service provider, to identify the person in question with the use of the stored IP address (BGH, ruling from the 16th of May 2017, VI ZR 135/13)[2]

[2] The BGH ruling quoted is the "Breyer" ruling again, just at the German national level instead of the EU level. The Bundesgerichtshof (BGH, highest German court of ordinary law) asked the European Court of Justice to settle the question of whether dynamic IP addresses are PII, which the ECJ affirmatively settled in [0].