How to Incapacitate Google Tag Manager and Why You Should (2022)

Summary

"We're long past the days when it was possible to simply say "no" to corporate stalking without consequence. Today, when we say "no", we get punished for it. But that only goes to show WHY, more than ever, we should be saying "no"." Google Tag Manager. It's a product which, by design, cloaks a range of the Internet's most invasive and unethical scripts in an opaque closet, then springs them out in disguise. Combining immense power with obfuscation and vast scale of use, Google Tag Manager is the WWW's single most destructive tool to public privacy and online ethicism. And it's getting worse. Google is now driving Tag Manager into the first-party domain, switching from third-party to first-party cookie usage, for example. Whilst this may look like a warm-hearted bid to increase privacy protection for the public, it's really just part of Google's relentless string of attempts to circumvent third-party content-blocking by shifting surveillanceware into a first-party container. This probably also explains why Google has not sought to prevent site admins from running Tag Manager on the server-side, despite such practices technically breaching this line in the Tag Manager ToS... "You agree not to... interfere with or circumvent any aspect of the Service;" I'll come to the burning issue of server-side GTM usage in due course, but don't worry, there are solutions... WHAT DOES GOOGLE TAG MANAGER DO? Whilst Google would love the general public to believe that Tag Manager covers a wide range of general purpose duties, it's almost exclusively used for one thing: surveillance. Tag Manager's close link with Google Analytics has ballooned the level of intrusion we now face across the bulk of the Web, as well as making Google Analytics more covert and more resistant to blocking. Making Google Analytics harder to block was fairly evidently not part of Tag Manager's original brief upon launch, circa 1st October 2012. The goal back then was probably just to put Google's finger on the ...