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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)

#751

Post by pixeldetracking »

gildas wrote: post #682
pixeldetracking wrote: post #453

I'm the author, good to see this on HN, raising awareness on the topic I don't know who made the translation and when it was made, but the original article in french ( https://pixeldetracking.com/fr/google-tag-manager-server-sid... ) contains more information on recent GTM "improvements"): mainly on how you can easily change JS library names and detailed instructions on how to host your container in other clouds or s…

> I don't know who made the translation and when it was made This page was saved with SingleFile (I'm the author of SingleFile). Therefore, I can tell you that this page was produced on Tue Dec 08 2020.

thanks for the info! maybe it's Jerry: https://info.woolyss.com/

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

#752

Post by mindslight »

airstrike wrote: post #709
franga2000 wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly! A company's goal is profit and most of the time, that does not align with the customer's goals. Amazon's goal is to sell me the highest margin item, I want the best value or highest quality. I have very limited information about which items are a good value or high quality, so why should amazon have the tools to most effectively steer me towards high-margin items? They exist to provide us a service and we gr…

> I have very limited information about which items are a good value or high quality, so why should amazon have the tools to most effectively steer me towards high-margin items? They exist to provide us a service and we grant them the right to make a small % of profit while doing it. Not the other way around! As a small aside, The capitalist's answer is that regulating companies to prevent them from steering to the m…

Most everyone knows the "capitalist's answer". But it's specious, as it assumes a large scale check that requires P = NP.

In the real world market inefficiency creates local maximums, which can then be leveraged to implement policy. The most lucrative policies are to make those maximums even stickier. Advertising itself is a prime example of this - in a perfectly efficient market, once a brand became well known you'd think that additional money going to advertising would be a waste - causing the company to be less competitive and they'd dial it back. But instead what saturating advertising actually does is crowd out any new competitors that might come along. So as a customer, you're effectively overpaying so that you can have less choice!

This effect becomes even more relevant as the costs of production drop to zero, as an upstart competitor cannot get a leg up by optimizing production - in other words, the brand itself is a larger component of the "value". And on the larger topic, these days large corporations are declared "too big too fail" and bailed out by the central bank, rather than letting market mechanics assert themselves in even the most pressing cases.

Effective libertarianism involves recognizing that corporations and government are not dichotomous types of entities, but rather that both lay somewhere on a continuum of coercion. If the companies offering a product or service effectively move in lock step on some policy, then your main ability to reject that policy consists of going without that product or service. This is perhaps easier, but of the exact same vein, as needing to physically move to reject specific laws.

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

#753

Post by [deleted] »

mbesto wrote: post #739
jacquesm wrote: post #731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You walk through town looking for a vendor and notice a guy with a megaphone is yelling to the crowd about Gold Supply Inc offering better prices on pans. Which may be true. Or not. And they may be crappy pans, or not. And that's my point: all that yelling just muddies the water, it's like a mountain of 'fake reviews' and no way to pick up the signal any more because of all of the noise. Marketing mostly lies.

I don't understand your point? You think that the average person: - Be fully educated on every product and service available to them in every market they encounter - Spend the time to speak to N amount of people via word of mouth and understand how many N amount of conversations are required to have the confidence to buy the best product (in terms of value, feature set, price, etc.) for the item they're looking for -…

[deleted]

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

#754

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#756

Post by matt_heimer »

terrycody wrote: post #439
matt_heimer wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using Google Tag Manager doesn't mean you are using the server-side tagging. You have to configure it in your account. It is something you have to pay for. If you read the instructions on https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/tag-manager/serve... you have to have GCP billing setup to pay for the App Engine instance running the server-side tagging proxy.

thx for the explaination, btw, do you think server side GTM can let Adsense bypass the adblocker, since it is what claimed in the article. Though after Googled a bit, I can't find a single article/video about this.

Somewhat. Some of the tracking protections center around 1st party vs 3rd party. If the site owner takes the time to configure the DNS records for this server-side proxy then the page is only communicating with 1st party domains so that protection is gone.

Next, ad blocker components often target various parts of the URL. By hosting on your own domain the domain name matching patterns that would be used for blocking no longer apply. But the ad blockers can also use just the path or file name portion of the URL to block on.

Easylist has a set of lists that are commonly used by ad blockers such as UBlock Origin. The tracking/privacy centric list is https://easylist.to/easylist/easyprivacy.txt which I'm using in UBlock Origin. If you look at it there are lines like '/gtag.js' which might match on the name of the JavaScript file and still block it.

Of course site owners might change the name of their script files to a non-default name making it harder to detect.

The next step in the arms race would be having more dynamic names for the files and URLs. You could rotate the names of the scripts and endpoints automatically at which point the adblockers would have to preform content inspection or some other strategy which is more resource intensive.

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

#757

Post by surajrmal »

User23 wrote: post #733
danuker wrote: post #704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, and perhaps also the accounts of users running this while logged-in. Have contingency plans if you run this and your, say, GMail account is blocked.

Anyone still using gmail today for anything other than throwaway purposes is behaving foolishly.

You sound like you are living in a bubble. This is like asserting anyone who owns a car is being foolish.

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

#758

Post by PhantomGremlin »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #566
PhantomGremlin wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN totally usable for basic functionality w/o JS. profootballtalk.com works great if you don't want to vote or comment macrumors.com great functionality nitter.net happily takes the place of twitter.com drudgereport.com works great and I rarely turn on JS when I go to the sites he links to, usually the text on target sites is there if not as pretty as it could be individual subreddits (e.g. old.reddit.com/r/Portland/…

> In conclusion, contrary to your JS experience, I'd say that I spend over 90% of my time browsing w/o JS and am happy with my experience. Things are lightning fast and I see few or no ads. I don't need an ad blocker since 99% of ads just don't happen w/o JS. Well, you still have lots of tracking stuff loaded probably, unless you got something extra for blocking trackers. A tracking pixels does not need JS. A font lo…

Well, you still have lots of tracking stuff loaded probably, unless you got something extra for blocking trackers.

Yes I'm sure I have that stuff loaded. But I don't care because it's quite ephemeral:

I exit Firefox multiple times a day, there's really no performance cost to doing that after every group of websites. E.g. if, while reading HN, I look up something on Wikipedia, or I search with Bing or Google, everything goes away together.

In my settings: delete cookies and site data when Firefox is closed

In my settings: clear history when Firefox closes, everything goes except browsing and download history

No suggestions except for bookmarks.

So when I restart Firefox to then browse reddit it starts with a clean slate.

Comcast insisted I purchase a DOCSIS3 modem quite a while ago. Once downloads are at 100 mpbs+, does it really matter if I repeatedly re-download a few items to cache?

The only noticeable downside is when I switch to Safari to view something that needs JS, I then see ads for clothing that my wife and daughters might be interested in. I presume this is due to fallback to tracking via IP address. Of course I always clear history and empty caches in Safari.

Obviously this doesn't work for someone who wants to or needs to keep 100 browser windows open at once, for months at a time. But that's not me. I don't think that way, never have.

Edit: just had to add that sites like Wikipedia are better w/o JS (unless you edit?). I don't see those annoying week-long pleas for money. Do they still do those?

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

#759

Post by sigmaml »

ATsch wrote: post #643
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? 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, th…

This view is probably too US-centric. There is a lot of the world (including developed world), where people get around everyday without relying on cars for everything.

I do not negate your point that marketing has a strong component of creating a need where there isn't one. But, its success in doing so relies on a strong combination of cultural, economic and political backgrounds.

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

#760

Post by suction »

darebak wrote: post #663
martimarkov wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel this would be headline news if correct so do you want to elaborate or is it just a throw away comment with no backing?

It would not be headline news because bit doesn't benefit any big capital player. Continuous support of Germany to autocrats is so widely known it even has a name, stabilocracy meaning that a country is ruled by an autocrat that is favourable to German and by extension EU business. Most blatant support to that kind of leadership happens to be when the German PM and EU commissioners congratulated Serbia on its EU path…

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