Most people (that care about this kind of thing) already knew that many of the other ad networks allowed this sort of thing. The more shady, the more likely.

Google wasn't like that. And this gained them a lot of goodwill, for providing a good clean ad network without all the dancing monkey scams. They just did the tracking with their own scripts, providing a dashboard/control panel with stats to the advertisers.

I'm really curious since when they started allowing 3rd party scripts to be included in their ads. And I am not at all surprised if the "big announcement" of this feature was kind of a quiet affair. Because this is the first time I hear Google Ads allows this and I'm just,... yeah. Surprised? Disappointed? Mostly just very pissed off.

I was already blocking most ads, but if you ever expect me to whitelist anything ever again, you better host the ad yourself and not use a 3rd party network, because apparently all of them are scum. Funny detail: if you host the ad yourself you don't even need to ask me to whitelist it, because most adblockers simply don't block these things as they are not distinguishable from a thumbnail link to an external domain :)