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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)

#771

Post by foxfluff »

surajrmal wrote: post #757
User23 wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I lost my gmail account a decade ago. Since then, year after year, I've been watching people suffer the same fate with gmail, youtube, google play, etcetra. There's always someone who won't believe that google can screw you over all of a sudden. There's always someone who will be surprised, always someone who thought it couldn't happen to them...

I don't know what else I can say. It's a shame I haven't been maintaining a list of all incidents I've come across.

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

#772

Post by dasil003 »

airstrike wrote: post #723
dasil003 wrote: post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind that capitalists have all the power and a lot of time and incentive to rationalize the status quo. The assumption in this argument is that consumers are able to observe and quantify the harm of tracking more effectively than regulators could create laws against data collection. Personally I think the success of either one comes down to cultural factors that are currently stacked in favor of advertisers.

> The assumption in this argument is that consumers are able to observe and quantify the harm of tracking more effectively than regulators could create laws against data collection. Not necessarily, because creating laws isn't enough to regulate. You also need to enforce such regulation, and that's where the challenge lies. The argument assumes that in the long run consumers are more effective at rationalizing their…

Yes, my choice of words was hasty and suboptimal. I meant addressing data collection practices via regulation as a whole vs consumer choice as whole.

The way you are framing this serves only to reinforce talking points from those who are benefitting from the current situation. For instance, you're basically stating a priori that regulation is expensive and ineffective, and as evidence you talk about long tail of enforcement and defectors. But the ad revenue market is so consolidated you only need to enforce on a handful of players (Google and Facebook basically). The idea that defectors would then swoop in and create a massive enforcement problem is not substantiated. There have always been fly-by-night operations in all types of business, and they don't gain a huge advantage that catapults them to overnight success just because others play by the rules. No one is saying enforcement is easy, but to assume that it will be fatally flawed if it can't be perfectly applied to everyone plays right into the hands of those who are profiting from abuse of our data.

Now on the other side framing this as a "customer value" problem that will be sorted out by the hand of the market is just pure capitalist oligarch koolaid. How do you expect customers to have any sense of what data practices are behind their every day digital product choices, let alone quantify that into a dollar value? And even assuming they do all that, where are the market choices when everyone behaves this way? Even where there is theoretically a choice, many services have a huge network effect that makes a consumer's choice all but pre-ordained.

We need to have a reality check here. Markets are great when they work, but they are not magic and can not solve all problems.

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

#773

Post by Teever »

themacguffinman wrote: post #501
strogonoff wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Individual businesses aren’t stalking anyone if their CCTVs are watching out for themselves. But as soon as there is a centralized company offering the service and gobbling all the data, and that company acts like Google does with regards to web tracking, then it’d be in some sense no better than stalking (or even worse, stalking at scale). If it only obtains the data to provide you the service of knowing who comes i…

Like ADT? Like a lot of security companies that offer monitoring solutions on behalf of clients, especially smaller businesses and individual homeowners? "gobbling all the data" is vaguely scary while being totally meaningless. GTM data is fully managed by the client, Google contractually does not randomly spy on it. Many businesses would argue that they do delete user data after they don't need it anymore, but analy…

How can you feign obliviousness so much that you can't see the difference between what ADT was doing in 1995 and what Google is doing in 2022?

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

#774

Post by paulryanrogers »

hilbert42 wrote: post #319
paulryanrogers wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tried NoScript for years and it was a pain. Too many of the sites I use need so many domains full of JS. So I think this will vary widely depending on the person and their preferred/needed sites.

It has to be said: there are people who can get by without JavaScript and those who can't. You can almost predict those who can and those who can't by their personality. If you are heavy user of Google's services, Twitter and Facebook as well as many big news outlets and heavy-duty commercial sites then you're the 'JavaScript' type and stopping scripts is definitely not for you! If you are like me and don't have any…

This seems like a broad generalization. JS continues to permeate every industry brought to the web. It's increasingly not optional as employers and governments mandate more and more web services. Doubtful that can be predicted by personality.

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

#775

Post by mbesto »

jacquesm wrote: post #769
mbesto wrote: post #739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 -…

> I don't understand your point? and > Sorry but that is hilariously out of touch with reality... are incompatible with each other.

I posed a bunch of clarifying statements to understand your point and instead of responding to them that's how you respond? Weird.

I respect most, if not all, of your viewpoints on HN (even if we disagree), but dodging the meat of my questions and clarifying statements isn't helping with your argument.

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

#776

Post by jacquesm »

mbesto wrote: post #775
jacquesm wrote: post #769

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't understand your point? and > Sorry but that is hilariously out of touch with reality... are incompatible with each other.

I posed a bunch of clarifying statements to understand your point and instead of responding to them that's how you respond? Weird. I respect most, if not all, of your viewpoints on HN (even if we disagree), but dodging the meat of my questions and clarifying statements isn't helping with your argument.

That's fine, but I think that if you don't understand someone's point then your best bet is to ask, not to extrapolate.

I'm not dodging anything here, it's just that it makes responding much harder because now instead of clarification we're off on some wild goose chase.

It's ok with me if you don't believe that people got by just fine before marketing became a weapon in the armory of companies that all compete for the same market because traditionally the reach of companies was fairly limited due to the cost of transportation. But (mass) marketing as a profession is a relatively recent invention, as are companies with global consumer reach.

The availability of 30 brands for the same niche is what drives one form of marketing ('we're better than them', when in fact the products are most likely at best at parity). The other is that plenty of 'need' is merely marketeers pushing jealousy buttons, something that you don't need to do if there is a genuine need for a product.

All that marketing and advertising is in the end an arms race and a big contributor to overproduction and overconsumption. The thing that needs marketing the most is probably the thing that you need the least.

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

#777

Post by carapace »

itsoktocry wrote: post #666
ATsch wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> because the reason you can't get anywhere without a car these days is marketing campaigns by the automobile and oil industry We aren't all brainless automatons. Not everything is a giant conspiracy. Have you considered that there are people that actually like cars and find them convenient and useful? Cars and the highway system completely changed the course of commerce in this country. Sure, that has lead to some p…

In this case it was a giant open conspiracy. It wasn't secret.

> a bunch of moustache-twirling executives sat in a board room figuring out how to force cars on people is a bit much.

That's pretty much exactly what happened. I don't know that they twirled their mustaches though, I'm sure they all thought they were doing the right thing.

"The Real Reason Jaywalking Is A Crime" (Adam Ruins Everything) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxopfjXkArM

It was a classic case of "seemed like a good idea at the time".

> Sure, that has lead to some problems we're going to have to correct,

That's pretty facile. For one thing more people (in the USA) have died directly from cars crashes than from all the wars we've fought. For another there's the pollution: exhaust is deadly poisonous, tires wear down and shed millions of tons of tiny particles of vulcanized rubber into the environment, the fuel we burn contributes to the Greenhouse Effect, the asphalt of the roads is toxic, and there are so many roads and so much pavement that it affects planetary albedo. Then there are the unquantifiable changes to the social order: streets used to be public ways for everyone, now they are the domain of the automobile and people are confined to the sidewalks for fear of mayhem and death. I could go on and on.

I think if an alien landed here and looked around one of it's first reactions would be, "WTF is up with all these cars!?"

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

#778

Post by Engineering-MD »

mkmk3 wrote: post #561
top_sigrid wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Private Relay uses ingress and egress relays. The ingress proxy does know your IP but not which sites you are visiting and what you are doing. The egress proxy is only connected to the ingress, sees what you visit but does not know who you are. Both proxies are run by different parties. With a VPN you would have to trust one provider, who sees all of your traffic.

Then is Private Relay equivalent to a two layer tor setup?

From my understanding yes, but with the caveat of being organised by a single entity (apple)

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

#779

Post by coffeefirst »

gizzlon wrote: post #304
probotect0r wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you going to block it "trivially" if you don't know which script to block? They recommend changing the name of the GTM script, and paired with changing the content slightly, you won't be able to tell which script is GTM and which is actually important to the functioning of the site.

If it's 99.99% the same I think we will manage :)

This was my exact thought when I wrote that comment. Then I remembered Manifest v3.

ITP, ETP, and plugins that can block requests based on heuristics will make pretty short work of this. In Chrome, come Manifest v3, plugins won't be allowed to.

So... this is all uglier and more complicated than I thought.

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

#780

Post by IHLayman »

hilbert42 wrote: post #396
raspberry1337 wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any tips for high quality content sites? It truly is hard to find these days

Yeah, read HN! There are stacks and stacks of them here on HN that are of excellent quality - I use HN as my 'quality' filter (and I reckon I'm not alone). Moreover, if one doesn't run JS like me then it's dead easy to avoid problematic sites as HN lists them (Twitter, etc. - and it doesn't take long to get to know the main offenders, thus avoid them). :-) BTW, I agree with you it is hard to find good sites these day…

A pedantic note that follows from this particular thread: HackerNews’s search capabilities are powered by Algolia and require JavaScript to work (turn off all JS and the HN branded Algolia page will not load). The reason I bring this up is that even good websites sometimes lean on free or free-ish services to provide extra functionality (such as calendars, discussion boards, issue tracking, or search) without realizing that such functionality may be a back door to letting JS in and any tracking/privacy-erosion that could follow from it.
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