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Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

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Re: Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

#31
post #20

Am I dumb or does this article fail to explain what does the tag manager actually do? And not just with a loaded word, such as surveillance or spying, but actually technically explain what they are selling for and why it is bad.

Maybe you’re being misled by the cryptic name. It’s got nothing to do with managing tags, it’s a behaviour tracker and fingerprint machine.

I mean technically you can use it to manage HTML tags to inject into a site.

Re: Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

#32

I have an idea that another way of preventing being tracked is just massively spamming trash in the data layer object, pushing thousands of dollars worth of purchase events and such, pushing randomly generated user details and other such events. Perhaps by doing this your real data will be hard to filter out. A side effect is also that data becomes unreliable overall, helping less privacy aware people in the process.

Now there’s a fun idea!! I wonder how difficult it would be to spoof events. Edit: looks like this might exist already: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adnauseam/

Since installing it on firefox on this computer (18 months ago or so) Ad Nauseam has clicked ~$38,000 worth of ads, that i never saw.

Between this and "track me not" i've been fighting back against ads and connecting my "profile" with any habits since 2016 or so. I should also note i have pihole and my own DNS server upstream, so that's thiry-eight grand in ad clicks that got through blacklists.

https://www.trackmenot.io/faq

Re: Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

#33

I don't think this article makes a good case for why you should. >The more of us who incapacitate Google's analytics products and their support mechanism, the better. Not just for the good of each individual person implementing the blocks - but in a wider sense, because if enough people block Google Analytics 4, it will go the same way as Universal Google Analytics. These products rely on gaining access to the majori…

But I like it better when they have to guess. If it's something we care about enough, we'll let them know.

Re: Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

#34
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you’re being misled by the cryptic name. It’s got nothing to do with managing tags, it’s a behaviour tracker and fingerprint machine.

I mean technically you can use it to manage HTML tags to inject into a site.

This is in fact what it is primarily used for.

Re: Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

#35

I don't think this article makes a good case for why you should. >The more of us who incapacitate Google's analytics products and their support mechanism, the better. Not just for the good of each individual person implementing the blocks - but in a wider sense, because if enough people block Google Analytics 4, it will go the same way as Universal Google Analytics. These products rely on gaining access to the majori…

Belt and suspenders approach is to attach analytics to the most important events on the server side and combine with the session.

If the frontend automatic js is blocked, it doesn’t matter.

Re: Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

#36
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you’re being misled by the cryptic name. It’s got nothing to do with managing tags, it’s a behaviour tracker and fingerprint machine.

I mean technically you can use it to manage HTML tags to inject into a site.

Well I can inject HTML tags (or elements) with native JavaScript. Or manage them. Why would I want a bloated third party piece of software doing that?

Re: Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

#37

I don't think this article makes a good case for why you should. >The more of us who incapacitate Google's analytics products and their support mechanism, the better. Not just for the good of each individual person implementing the blocks - but in a wider sense, because if enough people block Google Analytics 4, it will go the same way as Universal Google Analytics. These products rely on gaining access to the majori…

Effective and accessible UX design is a solved problem. It’s a matter of education of front end developers, not of A/B testing your users to death.

Re: Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

#38

I don't think this article makes a good case for why you should. >The more of us who incapacitate Google's analytics products and their support mechanism, the better. Not just for the good of each individual person implementing the blocks - but in a wider sense, because if enough people block Google Analytics 4, it will go the same way as Universal Google Analytics. These products rely on gaining access to the majori…

If the analytics brought us to this, of what use are the analytics?

Re: Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

#39
post #20

Am I dumb or does this article fail to explain what does the tag manager actually do? And not just with a loaded word, such as surveillance or spying, but actually technically explain what they are selling for and why it is bad.

Google Tag Manager lets you add tracking stuff on your website without needing to touch the code every time. So if you want to track things like link clicks, PDF downloads, or people adding stuff to their cart.

It doesn't track things by itself. It just links your data to other tools like Google Analytics or Facebook Pixel to do the tracking.

This kind of data lets businesses do stuff like send coupon emails to people who left something in their cart.

There are lots of other uses. Basically, any time you want to add code or track behavior without dealing with a developer.

Re: Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

#40
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean technically you can use it to manage HTML tags to inject into a site.

Well I can inject HTML tags (or elements) with native JavaScript. Or manage them. Why would I want a bloated third party piece of software doing that?

Since you're asking, you could use it to tie together triggers and actions to embed code in specific situations (eg. based on the URL or page state). It has automatic versioning. There's a preview feature for testing code changes before deploying, and a permission system for sharing view/edit access with others.
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