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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)

#611

Post by Chris2048 »

prox wrote: post #307
dxdm wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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)

[flagged]

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

#612

Post by Chris2048 »

Y-bar wrote: post #389
ThalesX wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most often such comments come from eastern parts of Europe, where nationalistic movements have a nice resurgence in past few years. I wish people would stop attributing our attitude to nationalistic resurgences. I’m a globalist and think nationalism and regionalism should be relics of the past and I keep getting put in the same box as nationalists because I am Euro-realist. With this frame of mind I think the EU po…

> I wish people would stop attributing our attitude to nationalistic resurgences. Why should we stop? Where I live (NW Europe) this sentiment is almost exclusively echoed by members of the refreshed "neoconservative/nationalistic" right wing parties. Other parties also have their qualms about government institutions, of course, but for different reasons and expressed with different attitudes.

> but for different reasons and expressed with different attitudes

What reasons / attitudes / sentiment are you referring to?

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

#613

Post by thejohnconway »

aembleton wrote: post #449
gigel82 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you identify tracking proxies though? When everything is going through the same domain you don't even know if data is being sent to Google, it's all a server-side black box.

By using Cname uncloaking that uBlockOrigin can do on Firefox. It should see that the real domain is Google Tag Manager.

I think the article mentions that Google recommends against using Cname for this, and using A records instead.

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

#614

Post by andrewingram »

jeltz wrote: post #584
andrewingram wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You have been lucky then. At the places I have worked the product people have not fought with thech but if anything they have fought against tech on this matter.

You're right about luck. Though I should clarify, I include tech in the "product team"; and it's usually me fighting back :)

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

#615

Post by was_a_dev »

mkdirp wrote: post #603

It is clear Google is finally feeling the hurt from adblockers and the like. That means we are winning. Google knows it's not what people want, but they clearly do not care. In my opinion, if you work for Google on things like this, you are equally to blame. You have Google on your CV, you can easily go elsewhere and find a decent job. Having said that, uBlock Origin, and I'm assuming other similar extensions, offer…

Yes a Google employee could go work elsewhere. But is there an equally well paid position at a more ethical company? As far as I can tell, all FANGs are as unethical as each other

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

#616

Post by pixeldetracking »

onion2k wrote: post #337
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…

The article is from 2020, and I don't think I've ever seen a site using this approach yet. It is an egregious attempt to circumvent the Same Origin security policy in browsers that developers and privacy advocates should rightly be angry at, but it doesn't seem to have caught on. That's something to be thankful for.

your are optimistic, most analytics guys I know are working with clients to transition to GTM server-side tagging

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

#617

Post by collegeburner »

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.

That's not true. I run a site like this and I want both. Yes I want to test what maximizes conversions, but this is also what helps me provide value to more users. And I also need it to determime how to improve the service I provide to users.

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

#618

Post by pixeldetracking »

lewantmontreal wrote: post #113
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't browsers shifting to a per-domain cookie jar? While you can never prevent one specific site from tracking you, this still doesn't (directly) allow your activity on Site A to be linked to activity on Site B, does it? Of course, fingerprinting combined with IP addresses will ultimately allow something that comes very close to it, so the current state (a few hundred trackers per website, all ending up harmlessly…

This is what I’m interested in. Article itself did not mention cross site tracking. Every website having their own tracking subdomain makes third party cookies not work cross site even without browser changes.

yes, they would need to get another identifier, and that's what is done with players like Facebook.

Sorry another of my articles in french: https://pixeldetracking.com/fr/les-signaux-resilients-de-fac..., but Facebook is making it easy to integrate their "Conversion API (CAPI)" with GTM Server-Side tagging

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

#619

Post by collegeburner »

jacquesm wrote: post #269
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…

Marketing is almost by definition not going to act ethically: their whole goal is to create a need where there isn't an organic one, and the KPIs by which marketing departments are run are proof positive of that. Nobody starts off with 'what would be the natural limit of our product sales', instead they start off with 'what is the total addressable market and how do we maximize our fraction of that' implying that if…

Ridiculous. "Tracking" and your so called "artificial" metrics have significantly increased my site's conversions to paying users and my users' experience. I did nothing unethical in the process.

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

#620

Post by collegeburner »

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…

No, you are voluntarily downloading and running their code on your computer. What you describe is hacking into somebody's computer, that is different. Stores take measurements about their customers, so do sites.
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