Hacker News Reader

Is it hard to block? Or randomize?

*.googletagmanager.com has been in my DNS blacklist for about as long as I knew its existence.

Right. It is not, however, on Privacy Badger's blacklist. And it takes quite a few clicks to put it there in the latest version of Privacy Badger. Did Google pay off the EFF, or what?

There are websites that actually break when GTM isn't loaded because they use it to load/inject their benign JS (along with trackers).

That might be the EFF's reasoning, although I personally doubt it.

I use Privacy Badger and some SPAs just render a blank page unless I turn it off.

There's usually a competing site with the same product or service to use instead. I get about a 2% site fail rate with heavy blocking, and I'm OK with that. I've had third party cookies blocked for a decade, and that causes a lower fail rate than it used to.

I'm blocking Google Tag Manager, and nothing important seems to be breaking.

* CNN - OK

* Fox News - OK

* New York Times - OK

* Reddit - OK

* Discord - OK

* Bing - OK

* YouTube - OK

Major clickbait sites:

* eatthis.com - OK (20 trackers blocked)

* inverse.com - OK (20 trackers blocked)

* knowyourmeme.com - OK (22 trackers blocked)

So, there's little if any problem with blocking Google Tag Manager.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com