Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

backlit.neocities.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 160 posts

Re: Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

#91

Post by econ »

jorvi wrote: post #58
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…

> want to grow our business and advertising is how you get your name out there Or.. you know.. offering a quality product?

Tiny trafic but everyone is buying things. High praise in the reviews, not a single organic link.

Re: Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

#92

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

DavideNL wrote: post #86
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/wiki/Changes-from-HTTP-Sw...

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Advanced-settings

Having tried both, IMHO they do not do exactly the same thing. One is pattern-based, the other is host-based. As such, one can use them together, simultaneously.

Re: Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

#93

Post by paradox460 »

Years ago, I worked on a site where we constantly had requests from the non technical side of the company to make the site load faster. We were perplexed in engineering. The site loaded and was ready for us in less than a fraction of a second.

Eventually we realized that every dev ran ubo, and tried loading the site without it. It took about 5 seconds. Marketing and other parts of the company had loaded so much crap into GTM that it just bogged everything down

Re: Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

#94

Post by mediumsmart »

mystified5016 wrote: post #47
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…

The point is to poison your ad tracking profile so that advertisers can't figure out who you are and what you'll buy. No matter how secure your browser setup is, Google is tracking you. By filling their trackers with garbage, there's less that can personally identify you as an individual

Apple bought the patent to do just that 13 years ago … the .Mac observer article about it is now gone - here is the archive record

https://web.archive.org/web/20200601034723/https://www.macob...

Carter invented it and got paid so they can bury it. Must be good tech.

Re: Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

#95

Post by [deleted] »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #92
DavideNL wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/wiki/Changes-from-HTTP-Sw... https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Advanced-settings Having tried both, IMHO they do not do exactly the same thing. One is pattern-based, the other is host-based. As such, one can use them together, simultaneously.

[deleted]

Re: Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

#96

Post by remram »

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…

> 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.

If you can write this without seeing how you are the very worst of our enemies, then I do hope your business die, there is obviously nothing that will make you understand. I still can't believe you put those words together, honestly.

Do you see yourself as a separate breed from your lowly users or something? How can you inflict and even try to justify what you yourself avoid and say you "hate"?

Re: Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

#97

Post by [deleted] »

remram wrote: post #96
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…

> 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. If you can write this without seeing how you are the very worst of our enemies, then I do hope your business die, there is obviously nothing that will make you understand. I still can't believe you put those words together, honestly. Do you see yourself as a separate breed from your…

[deleted]

Re: Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

#98

Post by reaperducer »

simonsarris wrote: post #77
aerzen wrote: 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.

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.

This is not unreasonable! People spend a lot of money on ads and would like to find out if and when they work.

Companies were doing this for hundreds of years before Google even existed. You can learn if your ads work without invasive tracking.

Re: Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

#99

Post by simonw »

mlinsey wrote: post #44
aerzen wrote: 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 is a single place for you to drop in and manage all the tracking snippets you might want to add to your site. When I've worked on B2C sites that run a lot of paid advertising campaigns, the marketing team would frequently ask me to add this tracking pixel or another, usually when we were testing a new ad channel. Want to start running ads on Snapchat? Gotta ad the Snapchat tracker to your site to k…

The self-service thing is such a nightmare. There are two things that you almost certainly cannot trust your marketing team with:

1. Understanding the security implications of code they add via tag manager. How good are they at auditing the third parties that they introduce to make sure they have rock-solid security? Even worse, do they understand that they need to be very careful not to add JavaScript code that someone emailed to them with a message that says "Important! The CEO says add this code right now!".

2. Understand the performance overhead of new code. Did they just drop in a tag that loads a full 1MB of JavaScript code before the page becomes responsive? Can they figure that out themselves? Are they positioned to make good decisions on trade-offs with respect to analytics compared to site performance?

Re: Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

#100

Post by Spivak »

remram wrote: post #96
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…

> 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. If you can write this without seeing how you are the very worst of our enemies, then I do hope your business die, there is obviously nothing that will make you understand. I still can't believe you put those words together, honestly. Do you see yourself as a separate breed from your…

Probably just doesn't want to take his work home with him :P

In a way I get it, I wouldn't buy or recommend the product I currently work on. Still cash the paychecks though. I also am the stereotypical tech person who avoids technology. I can't exactly blame anyone for playing the game. The guy who works at the sausage factory but won't eat sausage due to what he's seen is a pretty common refrain.

Post reply on HN