• Data Protection

  Ad blocking made Google throw its toys out of the pram

  Posted by Unknown Member on 15 December 2020 at 9:25 am

  Ad blocking made Google throw its toys out of the pram – and now even more control is being taken from us as it seeks to punish our insolence for daring to block their ads.

  Google makes its money from being the world’s middle man for online advertising. It’s kind of a tech company too, but in a good-enough sort of way rather than the “hey, we invented the transistor” sort of way. It doesn’t do anything nobody else can do, except leverage its search dominance into advertising dominance.

  No surprise, then, that the company is ambivalent about ad blocking. In its new Manifest v3 plug-in architecture and its recent server-side tagging moves, it’s taking control away from us and limiting what we can see – and therefore deny – of its ad delivery and analytics machinery.

  It can’t do this too quickly because it understands the political dangers, but you can bet that the giant’s kitchens have pots full of frogs on a low heat.

  To some extent, we’re still winning the battle. You can get multiple complementary plug-ins that deny requests to known ad networks, spot and block tracking tags, and so on. The more ambitious can install software like PiHole, which sits on your home network and does the same for all traffic, if you’re comfortable with setting up servers and tinkering with DNS.

  The more technical you are, the more options you get – although why no mainstream home router makers have put ad and track filtering in their products is slightly mystifying.

  But this balance of power is changing. With server-side tagging, for example, Google effectively takes over all the ad and analytics traffic from your browser and runs it in the cloud, where you can’t see it. That’s great for Google because it improves the quality and speed of data acquisition, but leaves us getting what we’re given.

  The safeguards against this being abused? “Don’t be a dick,” as one developer put it to potential users of server-side tagging. Bad news, mate: ad tech companies pretty much own the rights to dickhood.

  If you look at data analytics company websites where they discuss client-side versus server-side tracking, the number one con against client-side is “control rests with the user.” You might think this is a good thing – it is literally their biggest fear.

  Unknown Member replied 4 years, 7 months ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
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