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Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

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Re: Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

#131

Post by rvnx »

krageon wrote: post #121
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…

By hurting the advertisers you hurt google. It sucks that you are disadvantaged by it, but the truth of the matter is that once it becomes expensive enough it will not be worth it economically. And it is clear from your own message this is the only language you're willing to speak.

And you also hurt the people who create the content that you consume, it is a very toxic attitude (and maybe even illegal as it causes intentional financial damage)

Re: Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

#132

Post by zelphirkalt »

simonw wrote: post #99
mlinsey wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 some…

If there is one thing you can trust marketing departments with, it's their ability to ruin any website they have the chance of ruining.

Re: Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

#133

Post by zelphirkalt »

wglb wrote: post #125
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…

What do you expect this to do, long term? I’m curious.

Even if it merely makes using Google shenanigans unattractive for advertisers, that would be a huge win against one of the biggest perpetrators, privacy and data protection violators out there.

Re: Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

#134

Post by freeone3000 »

thatguy0900 wrote: post #81
freeone3000 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

oh no! anyway.

Re: Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

#135

Post by jppittma »

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.

It feels that way for a lot of privacy concerns. "Telemetry" is the scare word for debug log, core dumps, and stack traces. I think it’s completely reasonable to want those.

Re: Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

#136

Post by mschuster91 »

sneak wrote: post #70
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 > The only entity you're hurting are the advertisers using Google. That’s fine. Advertising is cancer. Reducing advertisers’ ROI is good too. You don’t hate ads if you’re spending $500k on them. You just hate receiving ads, which makes you hypocritical.

Well, in today's reality you need a job to at least pay rent. And employers need advertising to make money to pay their workers.

It's factually impossible to live in modern society without participating in ethically questionable activities at least indirectly.

Re: Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

#137

Post by zelphirkalt »

pmontra wrote: post #101
DavideNL wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Maybe, but the UX is so terrible that I never figured out how to use uBO to replace uMatrix. I always use both: uBO for ads and DOM elements filtering and uMatrix for JavaScript, frames, cookies, anything in the columns of its UI. Basically uMatrix is so donor to use that anybody can use it. The equivalent uBO section is so complicated that I feel I need to take a master degree in that subject.

You would be surprised how many people are completely overwhelmed by the choices uMatrix offers. Lots of people out there, that don't even know what a website can consist of, let alone what it means to block this or that, or have the awareness that they did block something, or the patience to properly unblock the minimum amount of shit necessary to use the website. For many people any effort at all makes them surrender to the global spyware.

Re: Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

#138

Post by Shacklz »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #127
malfist wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, I'm not too worried that I'm making the lives of people who spy on me harder and wasting their money. You don't have to buy privacy violating ads. You don't have to buy targetted ads

> You don't have to buy privacy violating ads. You don't have to buy targetted ads. Sadly, you do until the monopoly is broken up. Because as is your company probably won't survive in the market, nor you in your role, using anything else.

> Because as is your company probably won't survive in the market

Then maybe that business isn't adding all that much value to society to begin with and it's just not that much of a loss if it goes away.

If a company cannot survive without shoving their product into the view of eyeballs appealing to our most basic monkey brain instincts, it's maybe just better if it dies.

Re: Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)

#140

Post by malfist »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #127
malfist wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, I'm not too worried that I'm making the lives of people who spy on me harder and wasting their money. You don't have to buy privacy violating ads. You don't have to buy targetted ads

> You don't have to buy privacy violating ads. You don't have to buy targetted ads. Sadly, you do until the monopoly is broken up. Because as is your company probably won't survive in the market, nor you in your role, using anything else.

There are plenty of companies that A) don't advertise or B) don't use individually targeted ads

An example of A: carmex

An example of B: Ball Homes (sixth largest residential builder in the country), pretty much any lawyer, a mom and pop that buys newspaper space, TV space or a bill board

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