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Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

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Re: Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

#81

Post by thatguy0900 »

freeone3000 wrote: post #49
cj wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Preface: I hate ads, I love uBlock origin, I use pihole, I'm a proponent of ad blockers] I manage a Google Ads account with a $500,000 budget. That budget is spent on a mix of display ads, google search, and youtube ads. If I knew that 10% of our budget was wasted on bot clicks, there's nothing I can do as an advertiser. We can't stop advertising... we want to grow our business and advertising is how you get your na…

Hopefully it puts my browsers on an bot blocklist, which then invalidates the tracking profile and eliminates targeted advertising entirely.

My assumption with something as hostile as ad nauseum is that you were running the risk of Google profile bans

Re: Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

#82

Post by v5v3 »

I use:

VPN so constantly changing ip.

Tor browser for everyday browsing (has no script preinstalled). So onion provides double Vpn. Regularly closed down so history cleared.

Safari in private mode and lockdown mode for when tor won't work (tor ip blocked/hd video that is too slow to stream on tor). Safari Isolation in private mode is excellent, you can use two tabs with, say emails, and neither will know other is logged in.

Safari non private for sites I want available and in sync across devices.

Firefox in permanent private mode with ublock origin for when safari lockdown mode causes issues. (Bizarely Firefox containers doesn't work in private so no isolation across tabs).

Chromium for logged into Google stuff.

Chrome for web development.

Plus opt out for everything possible inc targeted ads.

I rarely see ads of anything I would want to buy, and VPN blocks most of it at its DNS.

Beyond that, anything else would be too much effort for me.

The advertising companies I'm sure know I am not susceptible to impulse buy on ads, I research and seek vfm so not really their target.

Re: Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

#83

Post by jpgreens »

1oooqooq wrote: post #11
rurban wrote: post #3

Just add the domain to your /etc/hosts as 0.0.0.0 Doing that for years

https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/zero/

What if we could resolve every domain to 0.0.0.0 by default at the start. When visiting a website manually through the browser's URL bar it would automatically be whitelisted. Clicking links would also whitelist the domain of the link only. Sure you'd have to occasionally allow some 3rd party domains as well. Guess it would be cumbersome at first but after a while it would be pretty stable and wouldn't require much extra attention.

Re: Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

#84

Post by arcfour »

throwaway65449 wrote: post #79
simonsarris wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The chief reason is that websites pay for advertising and want to know if the advertising is working and Google tag manager is the way to do that, for Google Ads. This is not unreasonable! People spend a lot of money on ads and would like to find out if and when they work. But people act like its an unspeakable nebulous crime but this is probably the most common case by miles.

If running spyware on people's browsers just to see if your ads are working is "not unreasonable", what is?

Try responding in good faith on a non-throwaway account.

Re: Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

#85

Post by behringer »

cj wrote: post #43
genewitch wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.trackmen…

[Preface: I hate ads, I love uBlock origin, I use pihole, I'm a proponent of ad blockers] I manage a Google Ads account with a $500,000 budget. That budget is spent on a mix of display ads, google search, and youtube ads. If I knew that 10% of our budget was wasted on bot clicks, there's nothing I can do as an advertiser. We can't stop advertising... we want to grow our business and advertising is how you get your na…

This is great. I seek out competitors to the companies that advertise so I can get the product without rewarding advertisers.

Man scape? Nah, generic women's razers. Pcbway? Nope. JLCPCB.

Screw your ads. Find a better way.

Re: Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

#86

Post by DavideNL »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #45
roywiggins wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's certainly not that bad if you have uMatrix to do it with, but I haven't found a reasonable way to do it on mobile. uMatrix does work on Firefox Mobile but the UI is only semi functional.

uMatrix is fully-functional on Nightly. Using Firefox Add-Ons on a "smartphone" sucks because one has to access every Add-On interface via an Extensions menu. In that sense _all_ Add-Ons are only semi-functional. I use multiple layers: uMatrix + NetGuard + Nebulo "DNS Rules", at the least. Thus I have at least three opportunities where I can block lookups for and requests to Google domains.

Doesn’t uBlock Origin in advanced mode do the exact same thing as uMatrix?

Re: Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

#87

Post by culi »

BurnerBotje wrote: post #22

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.

You're talking about Adnauseum

https://adnauseam.io/

Chrome banned it from their add on store but it can still be installed manually

Re: Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

#88

Post by culi »

palata wrote: post #73
pluc wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really isn't. I've been blocking all JavaScript for years now, selectively allowing what is essential for sites to run or using a private session to allow more/investigate/discover. Most sites work fine without their 30 JS sources, just allowing what is hosted on their own domain. It takes a little effort, but it's a fair price to pay to have a sane Internet. The thing is - with everything - it's never easy to hav…

Do you selectively enable JavaScript for the whole site, or is there a way with uBO to only enable subparts of it?

NoScript seems like the go-to addon

https://noscript.net/

It has pretty advanced features but also basic ones that allow you to block scripts by source

Re: Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

#90

Post by culi »

v5v3 wrote: post #82

I use: VPN so constantly changing ip. Tor browser for everyday browsing (has no script preinstalled). So onion provides double Vpn. Regularly closed down so history cleared. Safari in private mode and lockdown mode for when tor won't work (tor ip blocked/hd video that is too slow to stream on tor). Safari Isolation in private mode is excellent, you can use two tabs with, say emails, and neither will know other is log…

> Tor browser for everyday browsing

Do you just... log back in to Hacker News every day?

I downloaded the Mullvad browser (basically Tor without the onion protocol part) but having no way to save passwords ended up making it unusable for me

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