641–650 of 902 posts
Naive question? What would happen if we were to block googletagmanager.com at the DNS level AND use uBlock Origin to block all calls to "gtag (...)" functions? Source: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...
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The article claims ublock origin won’t work on sites that implement this.
The current version doesn't but there's not really a reason to believe it can't be updated. I think the author overstates the complexity of documenting these proxies and URLs for sites that run them.
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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…
> their whole goal is to create a need where there isn't an organic one This is reductionist. Was telling people about trains and cars creating a need where there wasn’t one? In a sense. But in another sense, it was broadcasting a better way of being. Marketing doesn’t have to be evil. Saying all marketing is evil is sort of a cop out for the people who do it badly.
That's a great example actually, because the reason you can't get anywhere without a car these days is marketing campaigns by the automobile and oil industry. First by suggesting the newly necessary road safety standards and ridiculing people for being in the street without a car ("jaywalking") to the point that it was criminalized, then by sponsoring enormous displays about the glorious car-dependent future at multiple world fairs (GMs "Futurama" holds the attendance record at 5 million visitors to this day), shutting down streetcar companies via lobbying and acquisitions and eventually even providing the US secretary of defense, who then used the defense budget to bulldoze inner cities to run highways through them. A development that caused the US to have the highest car dependence, car ownership and transport emissions of any large nation today.
So yes, I think it's fair to say there was a bit of artificial need created here.
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 don't have the time or energy to block JavaScript and/or manually inspect each domain's requests to figure out if they use server-side tracking or not." By default, I don't run JavaScript. I don't see blocking JS as a problem - in fact, it's a blessing as the web is blinding fast without it - and also most of the ads just simply disappear if JS is not running. On occasions when I need JS (only about 3-5% of sites)…
Wouldn't it be possible for a potential client-side blocker for this to intercept the gtag() method invoked on the client side ("Tag Manager web container"), even if that function is provided by a script hosted on the website owner's domain, as Google recommends[1]? [1] https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/tag-manager/serve...
Highly doubtful the method would continue to be called "gtag"; any js bundling / minification would replace that with a randomly generated string, and it's just as easy to randomize the server-side api endpoint url, making this virtually impossible to block (maybe a pattern analysis on the data being transmitted, but that can also be encrypted with random algorithms and keys, beyond recognition).
Blocking A/AAAA domains with custom URLs to prevent tracking is almost impossible, so instead let's flood the trackers with useless, incorrect data that's not worth collecting.
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adnauseam/
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…
They don’t need to, but they sure want to.
Fortunately, as bad as this is, I don't believe many companies will implement the worst version of it. (Server side + subdomain + different name scripts) The reason is that we had server-side analytics available for years and virtually every big website still implements the clientside part. If they can't be bothered with that, I don't expect they'll move the whole tag manager any time soon.
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Or they slowly drifted towards anti-EU sentiment due to the EU.
> Or they slowly drifted towards anti-EU sentiment due to the EU. Poland, through 7 national and 17 regional programmes, benefitted from EU funding of EUR 91.3 billion under the 2014-2020 ESIF programmes (as of January 2022). This represented an average of 2 400 euro per person in the 2014 population they didn't drift they already had it in their belly, they simply hid it to take EU money and build their anti-democra…
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I used to run NoScript then at some point (maybe switched browsers?) I stopped using it. You've persuaded me to re-enable it. Also - Firefox on mobile supports NoScript!
No, only FF on Android supports extensions.