Comment by bassdropvroom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bassdropvroom | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm missing how themarkup.org works, because I just had a look through the uBlock Origin log, and this seems to be vastly overstated. Looking through the source I don't see anything Facebook/Twitter related except for metatags for Facebook/Twitter. I don't see any Microsoft, LinkedIn trackers or anything as per uBo's logger.

Regardless, I have seen other sites that have a vast amount of trackers so I'm gonna ask my question anyway. Anyone know what the point is of having this many trackers? I totally understand that a company wants to figure out how a user interacts with their app, but what is the point of tracking using different trackers where there is a lot of functionality overlap. I doubt Microsoft, Google, Twitter, Facebook and whoever else collect vastly different data where this becomes useful. Maybe one or two different companies e.g. for redundancy but why do their need more than that?

Each company will want a ping related to their own tracking tags. I.e. if the visitor came from a Facebook ad, you want to notify FB about conversions so that you know how effective the ad was. Also it's required if you want some dynamic A/B behaviour on the referrer side. Multiply by each source (not just ads).

All of that could be done server side, but people don't want to build their own version of analytics, run it internally, and keep it up to date with all their data sources.

uBlock Origin with some filter lists (I suspect the easy privacy is one) will block calls to google tag manager, which prevents anything that would have been loaded by that from showing up in ublock origin's block list. I suspect that's what's happening in this case.

If I load about.gitlab.com without ublock origin enabled the FB network requests show up in in the network console.

In many cases it's about running retargeting ads on multiple platforms and tracking campaigns. For example, you might want to run ads on LinkedIn only for users who have visited your page.

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