821–830 of 902 posts
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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.
I Like the cut of your jib, and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
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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.
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> The polio vaccine serves an actual need, and if you're not selling something I would refrain from using the word marketing. Then I believe basing policy off your definition of marketing would require first a tribunal to decide if something is "marketing" or... Whatever the polio campaign was. Because the national, then international, polio eradication project absolutely included perception and behavior modification…
> Then I believe basing policy off your definition of marketing would require first a tribunal to decide if something is "marketing" or... Whatever the polio campaign was. Let's just use the dictionary definition and save everybody a lot of time: "the process or technique of promoting, selling, and distributing a product or service" So I think the polio campaign doesn't have to be hauled in front of a tribunal (is th…
Polio vaccination had to be sold as a concept. The public had to be taught, cajoled, coerced, and door-to-door-campaigned to volunteer to get stabbed with a cocktail of virus parts to protect them from a disease that hardly ever proved fatal or permanently debilitating. They had to be told their friends were doing it, their neighbors were doing it, all the "cool kids" were into it.
It looked like this:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E1XpNTjWQAIRb_y.jpg
https://cbsnews1.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2013/03/26/20d5929c-...
https://www.neh.gov/sites/default/files/styles/1000x1000_squ...
There were, of course, additional circumstances (having a President that is visibly impaired by the disease, though his people did their best to hide it, certainly mattered), but the March of Dimes absolutely promoted, sold, and aided in distribution of a service. Hell, the name March of Dimes was coined as a more marketable name than "National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis" because they were trying to convince everyone to chip in 10 cents to pay for the project (https://www.marchofdimes.org/mission/eddie-cantor-and-the-or...). It's every bit as much a sell as Sarah McLachlan showing up and singing over pictures of very sad puppies is today.
(And to be clear... Thank God it worked. It's great to live in one of the decades where my fear of polio is practically nil. But the point is: without marketing, none of that was a given. People didn't just wake up one day and go "I'm going to go get stabbed by a stranger with a needle full of disease-juice..." a vast marketing campaign convinced them that was the right thing to do. Same techniques that were being used to convince them they should drive to the injection site in their shiny new Ford because walking was for suckers).
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I really don't know much about this space, but do you think server-side tagging could be more or less susceptible to user resistance attacks like what Adnausium[0] does? Can we spam them into futility? [0] https://adnauseam.io/
Adnauseam's offensive tactics can still confuse these server-side implementations. That said, if Google et al figure a way out to defeat it, pretty sure they'd not be blogging or talking about it, at all, for us to know.
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Right. Everything in the article is wrong. GTM is still GTM and can be trivially blocked; the container itself isn't moving server-side. It's just gained the ability to proxy data to third parties instead of needing to load scripts for every tracker. This is better for performance, and should be explicitly in control of exactly what data is passed on to where. All you really lose is the ability to block a subset of a…
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.
Self-hosting by itself might make blocking marginally more difficult, but there are other reasons to do it:
- Browsers these days segment caches by origin, so there's no caching benefit to using Google as a CDN.
- With HTTP2, a first-party request is likely to immediately go through an existing (multiplexed) connection, saving a handshake.
- It's arguably better for privacy, as users and legislators seem to be concerned about links to Google leaking IPs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30135264).
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> Britain benefited hugely from infrastructure support programs, for example. how, exactly? compared to UK government expenditure: the funding from EU programs are a rounding error
Half of Wales and Scotland was rebuilt with European money that Westminster would not have dispensed otherwise, preferring people in decaying cities to "get on yer bike". If that's a "rounding error", think what the UK government could have achieved before and since, and never bothered to.
the block grant to Scotland in 2019/20 was £32 billion, whereas EU RDF was €1.8 billion for 2014-2020
or put another way: the UK block grant provides Scotland more than 128x more the EU funding over the same period
put another way: EU funding is 0.78% of that provided by the UK, which I think is fair to describe as a rounding error
additional points:
1. the RDF only exists because of Westminster: the UK government made it a condition when it joined the EEC in 1972
2. EU funds spent in the UK are funds from Westminster as the UK is (well, was, thankfully) a net contributor
(as a general observation: innumeracy amongst ultra-remainers seems to be very common)
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> Then I believe basing policy off your definition of marketing would require first a tribunal to decide if something is "marketing" or... Whatever the polio campaign was. Let's just use the dictionary definition and save everybody a lot of time: "the process or technique of promoting, selling, and distributing a product or service" So I think the polio campaign doesn't have to be hauled in front of a tribunal (is th…
I think we'll simply have to agree to disagree, because we're seeing the same facts and reaching different conclusions. The polio campaign included heavy use of marketing. Its story demonstrates that marketing isn't intrinsically bad; it can be used to bad ends. And any policy separating the baby from the bathwater in this regard will, I think, be a major challenge to implement correctly without risking making someth…
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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 That's very single-minded. Marketing mainly informs about a product, which obviously also works even if you already have the need for it. And it can also help in realizing a specific need which the customer has not pinpointed yet. That's the whole point of acting ethically, to support,…
Indeed. That's exactly what our marketing department does. Our product helps our customers comply with the law. The law created the need, we're just trying to make our customers lives easier by assisting them with complying. So our marketing team focuses on informing potential customers what it takes to be in compliance as few are well aware of what it takes, and how our product can help with that.
Your customers were required to comply with the law, whether or not your company exist.
Whether you help them or not is up for debate, what isn't up for debate is that you sell them something, which they may need but not necessarily so. It's not your product that they need, it is compliance.
Making their lives easier is great: as long as your product doesn't mess up, at which point I'm sure your terms of service will say something to the effect of 'well, sorry, but it was your responsibility after all' and 'informing potential customers' typically - in that context - takes the form of pressing the fear buttons for possibly not being compliant and selling them a solution which they may not even need.
Seriously: this is a fantastic example of how being on one side of such a story you might lose objectivity, if I wanted to know whether your product is useful or not the last party I would trust is your marketing department. Who would I trust? My lawyer, who I would ask to establish whether or not (1) this particular law applies to me, (2) the risk of non-compliance outweighs the cost of your product, (3) whether the products terms and services really protect me or if it opens me up to a new level of liability, (4) whether there is a better / cheaper product and so on.
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If you need to set a cookie for the correct operation of your site, then you don't need a cookie banner. The banners are a middle-finger to the GDPR.
... but "correct operation of your site" is in the eye of a judge and can't be evaluated before someone brings suit, so "better safe than sorry" behavior (at the cost of user time) is completely predictable. ... It's not even clear that it's safe to log IP addresses in the style of a default Apache configuration on a static website without user consent.
It's completely predictable that there are people who don't want to comply. Collecting personal information is a lucrative business.
Re. Website logs: in fact it's perfectly clear that a website log retained for the purposes of site management is fine. It's on the face of the regulation.
