Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

chromium.woolyss.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

531–540 of 902 posts

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

#531

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#532

Post by selfhoster69 »

southerntofu wrote: post #530
buro9 wrote: post #502

> As we have seen, Google does not explain ( https://developers.google.com/tag-manager/serverside/custom-... ) the reason for creating a subdomain of the website for its "proxy" server: > > The default server-side tagging deployment is hosted on an App Engine domain. We recommend that you modify the deployment to use a subdomain of your website instead. The reason is simple: it creates a denial of service attack on D…

Looks like the only sane thing to do is to block routes to GAFAM AS directly on your router instead of relying on DNS tricks. I knew people doing that over ten years ago and i thought they were kind of crazy, but in retrospect they were right all along. What if your website is hosted by Google Cloud Engine or AWS, should we block it? I certainly would. Please find a decent host that does not use their customers as hu…

A cron job on the network gateway that creates iptables rules to drop connections to x IPs sounds like a good plan.

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

#533

Post by aliswe »

ignoramous wrote: post #367
ghoomketu wrote: post #23

Pretty sure a big ban hammer is coming for Google with all such shenanigans, especially in trigger happy places like Europe and India who don't like their citizens tracked and are happy to create legislative bans. So you may win the cat and mouse adblock game but what are you gonna do when countries start making it illegal to use GA? (1) (1) https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2022/02/10/frenc... ?

> India who don't like their citizens tracked... Pretty sure the Indian govt bullied everyone into getting an Aadhar. The quintessential tracking device.

It's a government.

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

#534

Post by kristofferR »

CommanderData wrote: post #250
ornornor wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> privacy rights given to us by law (eg in the EU) > As a EU citizen, i hope that our ineffectual administration at least tries to fight this somehow. Of course, there is little hope. GDPR is thanks to the EU and I wouldn’t say it has no effect. It seems like you’re contradicting yourself with these two paragraphs.

GDPR has been a massive win for user/consumer rights. Its a piece of legislation law makers in the US are trying to mimic. Surprisingly the UK are trying to rid or weaken GDPR significantly after brexit. The only way to fix this problem now is through strong legislation.

> Surprisingly the UK are trying to rid or weaken GDPR significantly after brexit.

Isn't that the whole point of brexit - to get rid of various EU customer protection laws and regulations?

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

#535

Post by JumpCrisscross »

estrai wrote: post #441
dessant wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Both countries are democracies, current leaders were elected in democratic elections

Elections in which the ruling party has no real chance of being deposed, and thus no incentive to compete, aren’t democratic.

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

#537

Post by krsdcbl »

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…

I think there was never the possibility to "out-tech" tracking solutions in the first place. You simply cannot plug every hole imaginable that will be discovered, and still serve your service on a network.

The only remedy is strict legislation and judicial recourse against companies that do try to cheese it.

Just like you cannot possibly implement real world security and surveillance that makes it completely impossible to commit theft, but you can implement strong enough legal deterrance to make it a really unviable risk/reward scenario for individuals and corporations alike

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

#539

Post by tinus_hn »

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…

If the scripts are hosted on the separate domains they don’t have access to some global state and there is no cross site tracking.

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

#540

Post by hwers »

southerntofu wrote: post #530
buro9 wrote: post #502

> As we have seen, Google does not explain ( https://developers.google.com/tag-manager/serverside/custom-... ) the reason for creating a subdomain of the website for its "proxy" server: > > The default server-side tagging deployment is hosted on an App Engine domain. We recommend that you modify the deployment to use a subdomain of your website instead. The reason is simple: it creates a denial of service attack on D…

Looks like the only sane thing to do is to block routes to GAFAM AS directly on your router instead of relying on DNS tricks. I knew people doing that over ten years ago and i thought they were kind of crazy, but in retrospect they were right all along. What if your website is hosted by Google Cloud Engine or AWS, should we block it? I certainly would. Please find a decent host that does not use their customers as hu…

Blocking all GCP and AWS hosted sites is about as effective as turning off all javascript. It reduces the usable set of sites on the web to basically worthlessness.
Post reply on HN