[_jal]

Absolutely.

Just to pile on a bit, folks who honestly believe in this line of thought should embrace that cliche about marketing being a conversation.

Think about how you reacted to the last intrusive, nosey person you had to deal with. "No, I don't discuss my sex life or my wallet with someone I met in line at the coffee shop."

I totally understand that metrics are needed to evaluate your plans. Problem is, there is a gradient of behavior your team as a whole gets up to, you don't like to talk about the things you do, and the far end of that gradient is some really smelly, nasty behavior.

So in turn, my problem is I'd be fine with a certain degree of tracking, but I don't know exactly where the bad behavior starts. Once data leaks, it doesn't go away. So all of my decent moves involve overshooting and suppressing tracking I'd be OK with, just to be sure.

I don't know a way out of this trap, sorry.

Getting back to marketing-as-conversation, remember the rebellion over ad-popups? Yeah, that was a big moment of going so far the browser makers slapped you down. We heard all the same wailing, and yet somehow civilization survived. I'm pretty sure you can survive me refusing to allow you canvas-fingerprinting, or unlimited rights to run JS on my machine. Or even Urchin-tag-strippers.

[annabellish]

>I don't know a way out of this trap, sorry.

I don't think there is one, personally. All the goodwill is gone, and that's extremely difficult to get back.

I think what's important at this stage is that we pay attention to what has happened, with users completely losing trust and faith in advertising, marketing, tracking - heck, even _diagnostic analytics_ - and recognise what caused this.

Then, maybe, we can try and avoid it in future.

Alternatively: Move everything to locked down mobile platforms and keep driving straight towards the latest stage capitalism we can see, and just keep finding new ways to keep users locked in to a platform they despise more and more until something _snaps_ - but that'd be tomorrow's problem, right?

[true_religion]

Rather than popups or popunders, ad companies just open a new tab for their ad. It's the same thing and pays the same. Civilization survived because nothing changed.

[michaelmrose]

I'm not sure we are browsing the same web. On firefox with ublock I only see pages open in response to explicit actions like clicking on a link. Popups of the style seen in the 90s just aren't a thing anymore for me.

[_o_]

This one strips more tracking tags and you can use your own list in configuration: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/neat-url/

"utm_source, utm_medium, utm_term, utm_content, utm_campaign, utm_reader, utm_place, utm_userid, utm_cid, utm_name, utm_pubreferrer, utm_swu, utm_viz_id, ga_source, ga_medium, ga_term, ga_content, ga_campaign, ga_place, yclid, _openstat, fb_action_ids, fb_action_types, fb_ref, fb_source, action_object_map, action_type_map, action_ref_map, gs_l, pd_rd_r@amazon., pd_rd_w@amazon., pd_rd_wg@amazon., _encoding@amazon., psc@amazon., ved@google., ei@google., sei@google., gws_rd@google., [e-mail], [e-mail], [e-mail], [e-mail], [e-mail], [e-mail], [e-mail], [e-mail], [e-mail], [e-mail], $/ref@amazon., _hsenc, mkt_tok, hmb_campaign, hmb_medium, hmb_source"

Regarding overshooting, try with this: https://adnauseam.io/

"As online advertising becomes ever more ubiquitous and unsanctioned, AdNauseam works to complete the cycle by automating Ad clicks universally and blindly on behalf of its users. Built atop uBlock Origin, AdNauseam quietly clicks on every blocked ad, registering a visit on ad networks' databases. As the collected data gathered shows an omnivorous click-stream, user tracking, targeting and surveillance become futile."

[jagthebeetle]

Missing, among possibly others, coremetrics tracking tags (cm_mmc)

[redbluething]

Also gclid and dclid. Not that I think this is a great idea.

:P

[underlines]

also missing google analytics cross-domain parameter _ga=xxxx