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Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)

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Re: Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)

#381

Post by peoplefromibiza »

dxdm wrote: post #289
zwaps wrote: post #228

Crazy how evil Google is. Just wow. Since this runs entirely on the domain of the website, it can easily ignore your privacy rights, with Google more or less washing their hands clean of it. Indeed, if we take blocking trackers as expression of consent, the only possible reason this exists at all is to illegally circumvent privacy preferences. In other words, if you work for Google, you are literally working for a cr…

> our ineffectual administration It always saddens me to see EU citizens talk in absolutes like that. With some exceptions, and by comparison, we have some of the best governments in the world, and, for all its faults, the EU has been a huge net positive. Perpetuating these overly negative stereotypes just aids populists in replacing our good governance with the other kind that we see all over the world.

> It always saddens me to see EU citizens talk in absolutes like that.

Unfortunate there are many European enemies of the EU.

It doesn't even have anything to do with EU administration: EU can't prevent Google trying to trick users into leaking their privates data and habits.

Not at least until Google reveals their plans on how they're gonna do it.

On a final note: we accepted two non-democratic countries in EU, Poland and Hungary, and these are the results.

They infected all the other countries, like COVID-19 has done with people.

Re: Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)

#382

Post by kkjjkgjjgg »

niels_bom wrote: post #346
kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really worse for the users? Article also mentions possible privacy benefits, as Google could prevent transmission of some data to third parties.

Believing Google values privacy over profits is a bit naive I’d say.

Nevertheless it could be strictly better: the new version gives the OPTION to share less data, whereas the old version does not really give you the option. If you include third party scripts, they can just send the information to third parties directly.

Google could also be audited and would then have to prove that they really didn't share ay data, or whatever.

Re: Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)

#383

Post by pcthrowaway »

Can someone explain how they claim that TMS is running on 31.9% of top 10 million Alexa websites if Google Cloud itself only has 7% market share[1] (compared to AWS at 32% and Azure at 19%), if the TMS relies on the site being hosted on Google Cloud?

[1]: https://www.parkmycloud.com/blog/aws-vs-azure-vs-google-clou...

Re: Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)

#384

Post by pcthrowaway »

eru wrote: post #169
paulryanrogers wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tried NoScript for years and it was a pain. Too many of the sites I use need so many domains full of JS. So I think this will vary widely depending on the person and their preferred/needed sites.

I use NoScript with Firefox on Android (together with uBlock Origin). After I unblocked the websites I regularly use (and not the ad delivery domains), it doesn't get in the way that much.

Unblocking the sites you use removes the advantage of not being tracked by Google through tag manager though.

Re: Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)

#385

Post by GrifMD »

onion2k wrote: post #195
thenanyu wrote: post #10

As someone who has spent a lot of time on both sides of this, I think this is a great outcome, personally. The most annoying part of ad-tech for me, as a user, was the fact that I was running all sorts of random javascript, any bit of which could blow up performance on my browser. As someone who used to lead an e-commerce operation, I hated running all of this crap in my users' browsers because I knew it would get bl…

All that random crap will still run in your browser though. The important thing here is that Google are asking users to proxy scripts from a Google server via a subdomain of their site. That's relatively trivial to do as far as the code and config goes, and not costly for the user or for Google. The advantage to the site and Google is that those scripts now look like first party files; Google are using a first part s…

That’s inaccurate. You do still need to run a client side GTM script that adds event listeners for specific actions (like “clicks purchase button”). This is then sent to a server side container with whatever first party identifier the site may have (3rd party IDs aren’t supported as there’s no 3rd party cookies from Facebook and the like). From there a server to server network request is made to whatever tracking platforms (GA, Google Campaign Manager, etc).

Most of the tracking script these days is well written, at least the Google and Facebook libraries, so they generally don’t affect page performance, but some of the smaller players have script that can slow down performance.

With server side GTM, only it’s client side component needs to run, everything else will be server side.

Re: Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)

#386

Post by openplatypus »

saiya-jin wrote: post #359
prox wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I understand people like to talk in this way to show their emotional connection to the topic, but it’s not very helpful and like you mention, too absolute. It’s a system in progress, and we need to be invested in its ideals (fair, just, democratic)

Most often such comments come from eastern parts of Europe, where nationalistic movements have a nice resurgence in past few years. A prime example is Czech republic, a very euro-skeptical nation despite all the benefits it brought them. Hungary would be another one. That being said, as somebody coming from east too and seeing clearly all the direct and indirect benefits of EU, its far from ideal. The whole concept o…

> Most often such comments come from eastern parts of Europe, where nationalistic movements have a nice resurgence in past few years.

That kind of gas-lighting should not have place on HN. That's unfair and dismissive generalization.

We, Europeans from west and east, center, north and south walked blind into privacy abuse. If awareness coincides with increase of nationalist movement in Europe and US, that is not a correlation.

Re: Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)

#387

Post by PhantomGremlin »

mderazon wrote: post #315
hilbert42 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I don't have the time or energy to block JavaScript and/or manually inspect each domain's requests to figure out if they use server-side tracking or not." By default, I don't run JavaScript. I don't see blocking JS as a problem - in fact, it's a blessing as the web is blinding fast without it - and also most of the ads just simply disappear if JS is not running. On occasions when I need JS (only about 3-5% of sites)…

I don't know which web you're viewing that only needs JS for 3-5% of websites

HN totally usable for basic functionality w/o JS.

profootballtalk.com works great if you don't want to vote or comment

macrumors.com great functionality

nitter.net happily takes the place of twitter.com

drudgereport.com works great and I rarely turn on JS when I go to the sites he links to, usually the text on target sites is there if not as pretty as it could be

individual subreddits (e.g. old.reddit.com/r/Portland/ ) are quite good w/o JS. But the "old." is probably important.

I admit that there are lots of sites that don't work, e.g. /r/IdiotsInCars/ doesn't work because reddit uses JS for video. For so many sites the text is there but images and videos aren't. Also need to turn off "page style" for some recalcitrant sites.

In conclusion, contrary to your JS experience, I'd say that I spend over 90% of my time browsing w/o JS and am happy with my experience. Things are lightning fast and I see few or no ads. I don't need an ad blocker since 99% of ads just don't happen w/o JS.

Re: Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)

#388

Post by FateOfNations »

jmyeet wrote: post #350

There is one positive here: if this is widely adopted it means less third-party JS libraries run on your browser. That's better for speed and security. Frankly, Google is probably better at avoiding and fixing vulnerabilities than [insert third party ad network here] is. Plus, as noted, Google will restrict what data is transmitted to third parties like IP address. That's a positive. Fear of regulators is more likely…

The proxy is by default running in App Engine under the responsibility and control of the website owner, so I'd presume it would be handled the same as any other PaaS or IaaS service a company uses. The data sent Google products, like Analytics, via the proxy would still be subject to GDPR as it would if sent directly from the client.

Note that they do give website operators the option of running the proxy in their own environment, it's made available as a Docker image.

Re: Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)

#389

Post by Y-bar »

ThalesX wrote: post #372
saiya-jin wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most often such comments come from eastern parts of Europe, where nationalistic movements have a nice resurgence in past few years. A prime example is Czech republic, a very euro-skeptical nation despite all the benefits it brought them. Hungary would be another one. That being said, as somebody coming from east too and seeing clearly all the direct and indirect benefits of EU, its far from ideal. The whole concept o…

> Most often such comments come from eastern parts of Europe, where nationalistic movements have a nice resurgence in past few years. I wish people would stop attributing our attitude to nationalistic resurgences. I’m a globalist and think nationalism and regionalism should be relics of the past and I keep getting put in the same box as nationalists because I am Euro-realist. With this frame of mind I think the EU po…

> I wish people would stop attributing our attitude to nationalistic resurgences.

Why should we stop? Where I live (NW Europe) this sentiment is almost exclusively echoed by members of the refreshed "neoconservative/nationalistic" right wing parties.

Other parties also have their qualms about government institutions, of course, but for different reasons and expressed with different attitudes.

Re: Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)

#390

Post by noduerme »

GrifMD wrote: post #378
noduerme wrote: post #365

Ok. MotherFuckers be pirates. Does this affect me? I have a dozen or so websites for clients running the normal google analytics script on those pages. This article is hard for me to parse, but, it just sounds like the idea of keeping some session alive and serving it off the same backend (if the same backend is calling google...?) I'm probably not understanding what's going on here or how it would affect independent…

I’m actually in this industry! So Server Side GTM (SS-GTM) is still relatively new and a bit limited in the number of integrated partners. GTM in itself doesn’t do any tracking, not even Google tracking, its just a manager. So hypothetically you could use GTM or SS-GTM to listen for clicks on a purchase button and then send a hit to your own URL with your own user identifier (or none at all). Google wouldn’t record t…

Thanks! I'm still not sure what the privacy danger is, though. When a customer clicks a checkout form on a site that's usually via a Stripe or Square form, but we do capture a receipt on the backend. If I wanted to, I could send that data to Google now through the tracking API. I don't need to since we log it all locally on the server. Aren't we just talking about another way to inform Google if a page is hit, with some session variable, which would be totally optional to the webmaster?
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