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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)

#671

Post by jacquesm »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #590
jacquesm wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Was telling people about trains and cars creating a need where there wasn’t one? People were telling each other about these. > Marketing doesn’t have to be evil. No, indeed it doesn't. But as a rule it definitely appears to be. It's a bit like arsenic: it doesn't have to be negative but usually it is. > Saying all marketing is evil is sort of a cop out for the people who do it badly. If 99% of the people engaging i…

> It's a bit like arsenic: it doesn't have to be negative but usually it is This is a good analogy. In stories, arsenic is almost without fail evil. In reality, it has use in medicine, agriculture and ceramics [1]. > If 99% of the people engaging in an activity are doing it badly then I'm all for reigning them in We agree. And I have no horse in this race. But that 99% figure is largely confined to tech-based marketi…

> The people painting print ads and planning PR stunts aren’t hurting anyone.

You must have missed the cosmetics industry.

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

#672

Post by medium_spicy »

collegeburner wrote: post #619
jacquesm wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

- This thread is about marketing. Did you do all of the marketing, or did an existing infrastructure perform tracking and serve ads for you?

- What data support claims about your users’ experience? Conversions are not a good metric of user experience.

- People generally have a hard time evaluating the ethical merits of things that benefit them. Do you have some kind of independent evaluation so support your claim that you did nothing unethical? If a politician hires a lawyer as a fixer, and pays them to make problems go away with a minimum of information returned, is that politician acting ethically? If the fixer hires a hitman for that problem, does the politician’s ignorance of that act constitute ethical impunity?

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

#673

Post by ersii »

brobinson wrote: post #559
contravariant wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gorhill managed to get uBlock to block CNAME masked domains, so surely this wouldn't be that out of reach for an adblocker? Good luck getting this to work in google chrome though.

Maybe this will drive people back to Firefox? It's a perfect opportunity for Mozilla to do a marketing drive... oh, wait, they are busy partnering with Facebook (er, Meta) to do advertising stuff. Sigh.

Don't forget force-installing addons like Pocket as a service.. and.. Disney.

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

#674

Post by walterbell »

jeroenhd wrote: post #646

This kind of data collection abuse is why I think we need more addons like AdNauseam [1]. Unlike uBlock Origin, it's not available from the Chrome web store anymore, which is a good sign that Google hates these types of addons more than they hate simple blockers. 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 n…

Since this extension actively clicks on ads which may trigger payments, how do ad-fraud services classify endpoints running this extension? Could they consider this malware and add the client IP to blacklists?

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

#675

Post by brobinson »

xigoi wrote: post #258
inlined wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the solution will be for ad blockers to invest in neural nets to detect the graph of the code flow for known variants of the script. The software that detects plagiarism will be a good start.

That sounds like it's going to be slower than not using an ad blocker at all.

Hashmap lookups are O(1)

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

#676

Post by matheusmoreira »

jeroenhd wrote: post #646

This kind of data collection abuse is why I think we need more addons like AdNauseam [1]. Unlike uBlock Origin, it's not available from the Chrome web store anymore, which is a good sign that Google hates these types of addons more than they hate simple blockers. 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 n…

Completely agree. Stuff like uBlock Origin is just online self-defense against hostile megacorporations. Maybe it's time we started going on the offensive by poisoning their data sets with total junk data with negative value. They insist on collecting data despite our wishes? Okay, take it all.

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

#677

Post by kobalsky »

hilbert42 wrote: post #47
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 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)…

> and also most of the ads just simply disappear if JS is not running.

since we are talking about the future I'd like to point out that they can always serve ads from the origin domain without javascript.

I mean the anti-adblock battle will evolve until each page we visit is a single image file that we have to OCR to remove ads. then we will need AI, and they will have captchas that will ask which breakfast cereal is the best.

you can stay ahead of the curve but it's always moving forward.

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

#678

Post by mbesto »

jacquesm wrote: post #577
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Was telling people about trains and cars creating a need where there wasn’t one? People were telling each other about these. > Marketing doesn’t have to be evil. No, indeed it doesn't. But as a rule it definitely appears to be. It's a bit like arsenic: it doesn't have to be negative but usually it is. > Saying all marketing is evil is sort of a cop out for the people who do it badly. If 99% of the people engaging i…

> People were telling each other about these.

I've seen this argument a lot, especially by technically minded folks.

When you say "telling each other" what do you mean exactly? Do you think businesses just magically get talked about with zero investment in marketing dollars?

I get the sense that lots of people in the HN community don't realize when they read an article from that this is marketing dollars at work.

> But as a rule it definitely appears to be.

By your "rule", sure. I understand the gripe with marketing from the consumer perspective, but pretending is inherently evil because it (1) invades your personal attention and (2) you think people are going to organically talk about products or services they don't know exist is a pretty myopic view of marketing as a whole.

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

#679

Post by matheusmoreira »

walterbell wrote: post #674
jeroenhd wrote: post #646

This kind of data collection abuse is why I think we need more addons like AdNauseam [1]. Unlike uBlock Origin, it's not available from the Chrome web store anymore, which is a good sign that Google hates these types of addons more than they hate simple blockers. 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 n…

Since this extension actively clicks on ads which may trigger payments, how do ad-fraud services classify endpoints running this extension? Could they consider this malware and add the client IP to blacklists?

> Could they consider this malware and add the client IP to blacklists?

Do malware developers consider the countermeasure softwate created to resist them to be malware as well?

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

#680

Post by Vinnl »

gorhill wrote: post #598

I read the original article back when it was published in November 2020[0]. This is what led me to introduce new static network filter options: - strict1p, strict3p [1] - header=, experimental, disabled by default [2] I used Simo Ahava's blog as test case, and with these new options, I could craft a filter to block the Google Tag Manager script on Simo Ahava's blog. However due to the lack of more test cases, no more…

For context, gorhill is the author of uBlock Origin.

And for context on MV3, see https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

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