15 ms·

Twitter abandons 'Do Not Track' privacy protection

200 points by CrankyBear 9y ago

Analemma_ 9y ago
> "DNT seemed like a good idea. By setting DNT on in your web browser, websites that supported DNT could neither place nor read advertising cookies on your device. Well, that was the idea anyway." No, DNT seemed like a stupid idea right from the beginning. It's nothing but an "evil bit" that websites were always free to ignore (and what's more, ignore silently). I never understood the outrage when Microsoft had IE set DNT to True as default, all they were doing was making explicit what a useless, feel-good piece of nonsense it was while everyone else was just ignoring the elephant in the room out of motivated self-interest. So, good riddance. DNT was always an attempt by advertisers to distract people from the fact that the only real solutions to privacy problems are legislative, and they don't want that. Twitter abandoning it might be one tiny step closer to broad awareness of that.
- tehabe 9y ago
  Quite the opposite, that is the reason why websites like Twitter should honour DNT.
  - fintler 9y ago
    > Quite the opposite What do you mean by this? The "opposite" of what you're replying to isn't really obvious to me. :)
    - tehabe 9y ago
      I understood that DNT is pointless because no one is respecting the setting, if sites like Twitter would do it reliable, it would be better for others to do the same.
- yborg 9y ago
  Another example of the fallacy of suggesting a 'free market' will lead to desirable outcomes for society at large when those outcomes are counter to the goal of maximizing profit for individual players. I believe the idea was well-intentioned, but as noted had no chance from the start without some kind of regulatory enforcement behind it.
  - sambe 9y ago
    Not really. You could easily argue (and I would) that people simply don't value it highly, on average. You are free not to visit websites that track you, or use various other technological solutions (Tor, private browsing, ad blockers). There's not a great deal to learn about the "free market" here.
    - nkrisc 9y ago
      > You are free not to visit websites that track you Let me just check the public registry of what companies track me and what they're tracking.
      - arjie 9y ago
        If people really wanted this, you could easily build this tool for money.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
LeoNatan25 9y ago
My ad blocker has a DNT they cannot abandon.
- eridius 9y ago
  You may be blocking ads, but your ad blocker can't prevent the site from tracking you.
  - trendia 9y ago
    My solution is to change the DNS settings in my router to set all domains for Facebook to 0.0.0.0. So, *.facebook.com 0.0.0.0 I'm sure the same could be done with Twitter. This ensures that they cannot track you on e.g. a news site or any other site with a "share" feature. But... This only works if you're willing to entirely live without Facebook/Twitter. Probably not the best choice for the majority of people.
    - Skunkleton 9y ago
      That assumes that all facebook ad traffic starts with a DNS request for *.facebook.com. It may be that all facebook ad traffic is served in this way _today_, but that doesn't stop them from changing it tomorrow. What about other ad networks? What about other ad networks where you like to use part of their services (eg google.com)? What about ad networks that serve their content from a cloud provider? Blocking domains at the DNS level is a partial solution at best.
      - __jal 9y ago
        > That assumes that all facebook ad traffic starts with a DNS request for *.facebook.com This is true, which is why you need a better list. Like one of these: https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts (There are lots of others out there if one of those doesn't suit your fancy.) These things will never be perfectly inclusive, but they whack the vast bulk of the commercial surveillance shops, and have the great benefit of not being prone to bypass from browser/extension exploits. They also cut the flood of garbage down to a point where it is possible to individually see what bugs are getting through and do something about them. You're right that they're a partial solution, but they are a massively helpful one. If you're going to use one, do glance over the list to make sure you understand what you're blocking.
malikNF 9y ago
DNT made sense only in a world where there would be some sort of law to back it up. I actually had my adblocker turned off on websites I knew at least tried to respect DNT (reddit, medium and twitter), guess twitter's getting completely adblocked now.
- xxr 9y ago
  Was the initial hope that the tech would come first and the legislation would follow?
- michel-slm 9y ago
  I wonder if the major adblockers should have whitelisted the DNT-respecting sites by default.
  - woud420 9y ago
    They haven't for most cases but to be fair, even if the publisher would respect DNT, it doesn't mean that the ad-server at the end of the line or any of the other partners will.
    - d33 9y ago
      Also keep in mind that while this would be an incentive to respect DNT for some time, there's no guarantee that this would stick - they might at some point just get back to evil behavior when they get whitelisted.
- radley 9y ago
  I have no issue adblocking Twitter since they use deceptive ads. It used to be ads had to be clearly labelled as not to confuse with regular content. Twitter buries their "promoted" label at the bottom in light grey text, so you only know it's an ad after you've read it and asked "WTF? Why is this in here?"
  - eric_h 9y ago
    Somehow my brain has figured out how to notice that and ignore them. Scrolling through my feed I swipe past the ads faster than the other tweets.
shawnee_ 9y ago
Online privacy remains an issue that upsets people, but at day's end, neither companies nor the Trump administration have any real interest in protecting privacy. Does not surprise me at all. As a very early adopter of Twitter, I have to say I thought this platform had a lot of promise at one time. Unfortunately, it's becoming a textbook case of how massive ego corrupts and destroys a product, a company, and now even a country. It started with the lockout of developers' ability to write frameworks around the APIs and is ending, naturally, with these massive political bots owning 10K+ followers, spam that always ends up on the top layer of search. My disenchantment had been growing for a long while. Finally shut down my accounts earlier this week after they refused to offer "verification" my ecosteader account. Ten years I've been waiting it out, promoting this company for free, adding Twitter links to websites I build for customers and clients... and they do not even grant a courtesy gesture to show people that yes, the owner of these Twitter accounts is indeed associated with these websites. Instead, like everything else on the Internet these days, it's all about popularity and ego and bribery. Apparently, the rumor that the best way for a small company or org to get verified is to cash-bribe somebody who works there is true? If that's what you wanna do, go for it... but at least document your corrupt dollars needed and standards for bribery somewhere, so people can have some reference before they waste their time. The echo chamber and circlejerk thing has gone on for far too long.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
  > As a very early adopter of Twitter, I have to say I thought this platform had a lot of promise at one time. Given that is was a centralized, proprietary service from day one, so it necessarily would follow the interests of the owners, and that also has a strong network effect that locks people in ... how did you come to that wild conclusion?
  - shawnee_ 9y ago
    There was a (brief) period of time many years ago when Twitter was more friendly to developers; that is what I was referring to. What followed was a series of terribly bad decisions to turn it into a marketing platform, rather than what it what it was organically becoming, which was a real-time market research tool + analytics API. As a result of bad direction and big ego, today it is just an extremely noisy, mostly irrelevant, echo chamber.
xg15 9y ago
Ok, honestly, was DNT ever more than a smoke grenade for muddying the privacy discussion? The standard always relied on every single shady data collector out there to act against their core interest, facing not even the risk of detection (let alone punishment) if they don't comply, all just because you asked them nicely. You might as well carry a "do not rob me" card in your wallet. Was there ever a honest belief by anyone (except the Ayn Rand fanboys) this could work?
- Skunkleton 9y ago
  It certainly isn't a complete solution, but it probably did reduce the number of ad networks that tracked you. So yes, I guess you could say it works?
  - EpicEng 9y ago
    "probably" doesn't lead to "yes, it works". What's the tradeoff? How many good actors does "probably" imply?
    - cmdrfred 9y ago
      Chemotherapy will probably cure your cancer but since it isn't 100% effective you'd decline?
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - EpicEng 9y ago
        well, that's not what I said either, so bad on you for the false analogy. Staying in line with my actual argument and using your analogy; what is the success rate of chemo? This is absolutely a main driver in the treatment decision making process. 5%? Nah, I'll pass; I don't want to spend my last six months in agony, so it's not worth it (i.e., bad trade-off). 95%? Hell yes, sign me up. Your own analogy supports what I said earlier. On a side note, the statement "Chemotherapy will probably cure your cancer" is also not true and shows a bit of ignorance re cancer therapies in general.
ars 9y ago
It's interesting how Microsoft killed DNT - by supporting it. Once they made it the default, it was all over. It was so obvious that doing so would kill DNT that I have to wonder if they did that on purpose. It's definitely an interesting way of stopping something you don't like - support it to such a degree that those who asked for it don't want it anymore.
- dudus 9y ago
  This. If any Good citizen site ever thought about honoring DNT they got their plans crushed when Microsoft did this. It was a silly proposal from the start but a hopeful one. Hopeful that people would do the right thing. The web was always built on assumptions that the other side would do the right thing in that context DNT was not so silly. This one failed. Because Microsoft didn't do the right thing. They decided to use DNT as a marketing platform instead.
  - staticassertion 9y ago
    I think you're putting too much blame on Microsoft here. DNT was always garbage, the fact that as soon as anyone used it (it becoming default for IE being the push in this case) it would fall apart just shows that it was always doomed. Shouldn't not being tracked be the default? Shouldn't we be opting into targeted ads, not out of them? Seems reasonable, if DNT weren't garbage, to have it be on by default. But it was garbage and so it was never really any help to anyone anyway. Really, everyone should just install an adblocker, and whitelist sites that are non-invasive, don't track, and that you want to support. Then the responsibility isn't on advertisers not to track us, it's on citizens to whitelist sites that they genuinely should be supporting.
    - Crespyl 9y ago
      I think you're right that "not being tracked" should be the default, in so much as having an adblocker and blacklisting known trackers should be defaults. These are things that my user-agent should be doing automatically to protect me and improve my experience. On the other hand, DNT is intended to be an opt-in polite request for other agents to change their usual behavior. An adblocker or tracking blocker at the browser/user-agent level does nothing to change how the servers that I do connect to behave. It just alters the behavior of my browser to not contact at all unrelated third parties. With DNT, my user-agent still contacts those third parties, but with a request to alter their default behavior. "Please, give me adco.com/somead, but please don't correlate this request with other information you have on me, etc." I do think there's a possible place for something like that, but it has to be opt-in or nobody will listen to it. Trivial examples of other "please deviate from your default behavior" requests are things like "show desktop version" on mobile browsers, Accept/Accept-Language (where supported), etc. On the gripping hand, it's also yet another bit to differentiate me from everyone else, and expecting polite and ethical behavior from advertising corporations probably really is doomed to failure.
awinter-py 9y ago
upvote != endorsement
awinter-py 9y ago
what if instead of using ad blockers we use ad amplifiers that downloaded 10 or 100 copies of video ads to make sure we got the data correct? Serving video is pretty expensive. How big are the ad networks' margins? Let's see who blinks first.
- mdpopescu 9y ago
  I think the internet is bad (and metered) in a lot of places in North America, so this would be counterproductive. However, it might work in Europe.
  - djrogers 9y ago
    Very little of the internet in North America is 'bad', and in the US very little is metered beyond mobile. There are ISPs who technically have data caps, but very few people ever come close to them.
- pjc50 9y ago
  Ironically if you make this look like "click fraud" you can probably ensure that the site doesn't get paid for serving ads - but the ad network was still paid by their clients.
  - awinter-py 9y ago
    If an ad network marks a click as fraudulent but still charges the advertiser, aren't they guilty of fraud as well? That seems like risky behavior for a company.
- kodablah 9y ago
  See https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam
  - awinter-py 9y ago
    Ok, this seems like click fraud. I'm just proposing downloading videos multiple times to ensure a good copy.
10165 9y ago
Commenters are confusing ads versus tracking. Remember that it is possible to track users without the use of ads. A browser written by an organization that profits from ad revenue or collecting user information (hereafter "well-known browser") will load elements, e.g., images, in a web page automatically. No user interactivity is required. The user need not "click" anything. The user may not even be able to see the element loaded. Email clients supporting HTML email can do the same thing, loading images automatically, hence suporting a method of tracking. This is a very old method but still widely used. What if the user is not using a "well-known browser"? What if those elements will not be loaded automatically? Will these methods of tracking still work? All methods of tracking, other than IP addresses in access logs, rely on assumptions. Many rely on assumptions about usage of a "well-known browser". The assumption re: automatically loaded elements, "beacons" or whatever one wants to call them, is that the user is using a "well-known browser" that will load elements automatically. If the user is not using a "well-known browser", all bets are off? Another example is the HTTP header "fingerprint". HTTP headers are tied to "well-known browsers". What if suddenly all users decided to only send the same minimal headers? In the way that some server software might try to hide its version (e.g., BIND) imagine that users decided to hide their client software version. Aside from IP addresses, many methods of web tracking are heavily reliant on assumptions about use of "well-known browsers" and the behavior of those browsers. Could these assumptions ever fail to be true? Can users think for themselves? The www as a medium for exchanging information or even doing commerce does not necessarily require the use of any particular browser. That "requirement" is only imposed by certain sites on the www, for reasons that may ultimatley benefit the site owner more than its users. No such "requirement" is imposed by the www itself. Thinking of this in terms of "a carrot and a stick", as far as I have seen using the www since 1993 there is only a carrot in the form of a "well-known browser". There is no stick. Users are free to make HTTP requests using any client they choose, including ones that do not expose them to advertising or tracking. Such clients may not require an "adblocker" because they do not requests elements automatically. There used to be and perhaps there still is a never-ending battle between commercial entities over which is the "default browser" in a graphical OS. Certain companies tried to coax users into using certain "well-known browsers". There was even a large antitrust case in the US over this issue. The implication seemed to be that if not set by default users might otherwise choose some other HTTP client to interact with the www. In those days one company wanted to sell a browser as enterprise software. Today that browser is owned by a "non-profit" organization of salaried employees. Other well-known browsers are owned by "for profit" (subject to taxation) commercial entities with thousands of employees. Today, these well-known browsers are "free". And yet these browsers are written by salaried employees, not open-source project volunteers. These entities continue to market their "free" browsers aggressively to users. As a user, ask yourself why. Ads? Tracking?
shmerl 9y ago
Well, ad blockers are still here.
lawl 9y ago
If you take a look at any fingerprinting code in the wild, ALL of them use your DNT setting as another bit to track you. It had the exact opposite effect it intended to have.
politician 9y ago
(Kicking around an idea to build this:) Would anybody be interested in a local DNS server that automatically updated its list of black-holed domains through a mechanism that preserved your privacy? (Assuming, of course, a decentralized representation of the block lists.) Would anybody be willing to sell their attention by accepting payment (BTC), perhaps through a dutch auction, to re-enable a black-holed domain for a time-limited period? (Hand-waving the mechanism for ensuring that the domain was actually whitelisted.) I'd personally be interested in the former, and would likely use the latter - even though I find it hilariously unlikely that Ad Networks or Web Sites would participate in bidding for my attention directly.
- victorvation 9y ago
  Large ad publishers such as Google and Facebook are already doing the equivalent of auctioning users' attention by proxy of views, clicks, and conversions through their existing ad delivery methods.
  - politician 9y ago
    Wouldn't you rather be in control?
- shuntress 9y ago
  If you don't already know about it, definitely check out https://pi-hole.net/ https://pi-hole.net/ I'm not totally clear on where their blacklist comes from but their mainpage claims "Known ad-serving domains are pulled from third party sources and compiled into one list" This is pretty much exactly your first suggestion and seems like it would be an excellent platform on which to launch your second suggestion.
  - stordoff 9y ago
    Default block lists appear to be: https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole/wiki/Customising-sources-for-ad-lists https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole/wiki/Customising-sources-... The most comprehensive of the lists appears to be https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts , which is the same list I use for DNS filtering on my DD-WRT router. Seems to work pretty well.
theprop 9y ago
I always suspected Mozilla pushed Do Not Track to undermine online privacy. It was a doomed idea from the start -- all DNT does is politely ask a website not to track you. Setting their browser to DNT on did give tens of millions of Firefox users the illusion they were getting a high level of privacy (so they presumably would stick to Firefox) even though it didn't actually do very much.
- Chaebixi 9y ago
  > I always suspected Mozilla pushed Do Not Track to undermine online privacy. What motivation does Mozilla have to want to "undermine online privacy?" Of all the major browser vendors, they seem the least coupled to the privacy-invading ad ecosystem.
  - theprop 9y ago
    The Mozilla that was using your browsing history to target new tab page ads to you? That's "least" coupled to the privacy-invading ecosystem? That gets hundreds of millions of dollars a year from Google & Yahoo/Microsoft in search revenues without pushing them to provide a genuine private search?
    - Chaebixi 9y ago
      > The Mozilla that was using your browsing history to target new tab page ads to you? That's "least" coupled to the privacy-invading ecosystem? Yeah it's the least coupled, because the major alternatives (e.g. Google) literally run the privacy-invading ad networks. Mozilla walked back from the tab-page ads more than a year ago. > without pushing them to provide a genuine private search? How much leverage do you think Mozilla has with the search engines? Google canceled their deal with them because they are so dominant and Chrome has been so successful. Mozilla needs revenue to keep the lights on, and the search engines are the source of it.
djrogers 9y ago
What a shock - the voluntary and arbitrarily interpreted 'feature' designed by advertising companies failed to protect anyone's privacy...

200 points by CrankyBear 9y ago

> "DNT seemed like a good idea. By setting DNT on in your web browser, websites that supported DNT could neither place nor read advertising cookies on your device. Well, that was the idea anyway." No, DNT seemed like a stupid idea right from the beginning. It's nothing but an "evil bit" that websites were always free to ignore (and what's more, ignore silently). I never understood the outrage when Microsoft had IE set DNT to True as default, all they were doing was making explicit what a useless, feel-good piece of nonsense it was while everyone else was just ignoring the elephant in the room out of motivated self-interest. So, good riddance. DNT was always an attempt by advertisers to distract people from the fact that the only real solutions to privacy problems are legislative, and they don't want that. Twitter abandoning it might be one tiny step closer to broad awareness of that.

tehabe 9y ago
Quite the opposite, that is the reason why websites like Twitter should honour DNT.
- fintler 9y ago
  > Quite the opposite What do you mean by this? The "opposite" of what you're replying to isn't really obvious to me. :)
  - tehabe 9y ago
    I understood that DNT is pointless because no one is respecting the setting, if sites like Twitter would do it reliable, it would be better for others to do the same.
yborg 9y ago
Another example of the fallacy of suggesting a 'free market' will lead to desirable outcomes for society at large when those outcomes are counter to the goal of maximizing profit for individual players. I believe the idea was well-intentioned, but as noted had no chance from the start without some kind of regulatory enforcement behind it.
- sambe 9y ago
  Not really. You could easily argue (and I would) that people simply don't value it highly, on average. You are free not to visit websites that track you, or use various other technological solutions (Tor, private browsing, ad blockers). There's not a great deal to learn about the "free market" here.
  - nkrisc 9y ago
    > You are free not to visit websites that track you Let me just check the public registry of what companies track me and what they're tracking.
    - arjie 9y ago
      If people really wanted this, you could easily build this tool for money.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

LeoNatan25 9y ago

My ad blocker has a DNT they cannot abandon.

eridius 9y ago
You may be blocking ads, but your ad blocker can't prevent the site from tracking you.
- trendia 9y ago
  My solution is to change the DNS settings in my router to set all domains for Facebook to 0.0.0.0. So, *.facebook.com 0.0.0.0 I'm sure the same could be done with Twitter. This ensures that they cannot track you on e.g. a news site or any other site with a "share" feature. But... This only works if you're willing to entirely live without Facebook/Twitter. Probably not the best choice for the majority of people.
  - Skunkleton 9y ago
    That assumes that all facebook ad traffic starts with a DNS request for *.facebook.com. It may be that all facebook ad traffic is served in this way _today_, but that doesn't stop them from changing it tomorrow. What about other ad networks? What about other ad networks where you like to use part of their services (eg google.com)? What about ad networks that serve their content from a cloud provider? Blocking domains at the DNS level is a partial solution at best.
    - __jal 9y ago
      > That assumes that all facebook ad traffic starts with a DNS request for *.facebook.com This is true, which is why you need a better list. Like one of these: https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts (There are lots of others out there if one of those doesn't suit your fancy.) These things will never be perfectly inclusive, but they whack the vast bulk of the commercial surveillance shops, and have the great benefit of not being prone to bypass from browser/extension exploits. They also cut the flood of garbage down to a point where it is possible to individually see what bugs are getting through and do something about them. You're right that they're a partial solution, but they are a massively helpful one. If you're going to use one, do glance over the list to make sure you understand what you're blocking.

malikNF 9y ago

DNT made sense only in a world where there would be some sort of law to back it up. I actually had my adblocker turned off on websites I knew at least tried to respect DNT (reddit, medium and twitter), guess twitter's getting completely adblocked now.

xxr 9y ago
Was the initial hope that the tech would come first and the legislation would follow?
michel-slm 9y ago
I wonder if the major adblockers should have whitelisted the DNT-respecting sites by default.
- woud420 9y ago
  They haven't for most cases but to be fair, even if the publisher would respect DNT, it doesn't mean that the ad-server at the end of the line or any of the other partners will.
  - d33 9y ago
    Also keep in mind that while this would be an incentive to respect DNT for some time, there's no guarantee that this would stick - they might at some point just get back to evil behavior when they get whitelisted.
radley 9y ago
I have no issue adblocking Twitter since they use deceptive ads. It used to be ads had to be clearly labelled as not to confuse with regular content. Twitter buries their "promoted" label at the bottom in light grey text, so you only know it's an ad after you've read it and asked "WTF? Why is this in here?"
- eric_h 9y ago
  Somehow my brain has figured out how to notice that and ignore them. Scrolling through my feed I swipe past the ads faster than the other tweets.

shawnee_ 9y ago

Online privacy remains an issue that upsets people, but at day's end, neither companies nor the Trump administration have any real interest in protecting privacy. Does not surprise me at all. As a very early adopter of Twitter, I have to say I thought this platform had a lot of promise at one time. Unfortunately, it's becoming a textbook case of how massive ego corrupts and destroys a product, a company, and now even a country. It started with the lockout of developers' ability to write frameworks around the APIs and is ending, naturally, with these massive political bots owning 10K+ followers, spam that always ends up on the top layer of search. My disenchantment had been growing for a long while. Finally shut down my accounts earlier this week after they refused to offer "verification" my ecosteader account. Ten years I've been waiting it out, promoting this company for free, adding Twitter links to websites I build for customers and clients... and they do not even grant a courtesy gesture to show people that yes, the owner of these Twitter accounts is indeed associated with these websites. Instead, like everything else on the Internet these days, it's all about popularity and ego and bribery. Apparently, the rumor that the best way for a small company or org to get verified is to cash-bribe somebody who works there is true? If that's what you wanna do, go for it... but at least document your corrupt dollars needed and standards for bribery somewhere, so people can have some reference before they waste their time. The echo chamber and circlejerk thing has gone on for far too long.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
> As a very early adopter of Twitter, I have to say I thought this platform had a lot of promise at one time. Given that is was a centralized, proprietary service from day one, so it necessarily would follow the interests of the owners, and that also has a strong network effect that locks people in ... how did you come to that wild conclusion?
- shawnee_ 9y ago
  There was a (brief) period of time many years ago when Twitter was more friendly to developers; that is what I was referring to. What followed was a series of terribly bad decisions to turn it into a marketing platform, rather than what it what it was organically becoming, which was a real-time market research tool + analytics API. As a result of bad direction and big ego, today it is just an extremely noisy, mostly irrelevant, echo chamber.

xg15 9y ago

Ok, honestly, was DNT ever more than a smoke grenade for muddying the privacy discussion? The standard always relied on every single shady data collector out there to act against their core interest, facing not even the risk of detection (let alone punishment) if they don't comply, all just because you asked them nicely. You might as well carry a "do not rob me" card in your wallet. Was there ever a honest belief by anyone (except the Ayn Rand fanboys) this could work?

Skunkleton 9y ago
It certainly isn't a complete solution, but it probably did reduce the number of ad networks that tracked you. So yes, I guess you could say it works?
- EpicEng 9y ago
  "probably" doesn't lead to "yes, it works". What's the tradeoff? How many good actors does "probably" imply?
  - cmdrfred 9y ago
    Chemotherapy will probably cure your cancer but since it isn't 100% effective you'd decline?
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - EpicEng 9y ago
      well, that's not what I said either, so bad on you for the false analogy. Staying in line with my actual argument and using your analogy; what is the success rate of chemo? This is absolutely a main driver in the treatment decision making process. 5%? Nah, I'll pass; I don't want to spend my last six months in agony, so it's not worth it (i.e., bad trade-off). 95%? Hell yes, sign me up. Your own analogy supports what I said earlier. On a side note, the statement "Chemotherapy will probably cure your cancer" is also not true and shows a bit of ignorance re cancer therapies in general.

ars 9y ago

It's interesting how Microsoft killed DNT - by supporting it. Once they made it the default, it was all over. It was so obvious that doing so would kill DNT that I have to wonder if they did that on purpose. It's definitely an interesting way of stopping something you don't like - support it to such a degree that those who asked for it don't want it anymore.

dudus 9y ago
This. If any Good citizen site ever thought about honoring DNT they got their plans crushed when Microsoft did this. It was a silly proposal from the start but a hopeful one. Hopeful that people would do the right thing. The web was always built on assumptions that the other side would do the right thing in that context DNT was not so silly. This one failed. Because Microsoft didn't do the right thing. They decided to use DNT as a marketing platform instead.
- staticassertion 9y ago
  I think you're putting too much blame on Microsoft here. DNT was always garbage, the fact that as soon as anyone used it (it becoming default for IE being the push in this case) it would fall apart just shows that it was always doomed. Shouldn't not being tracked be the default? Shouldn't we be opting into targeted ads, not out of them? Seems reasonable, if DNT weren't garbage, to have it be on by default. But it was garbage and so it was never really any help to anyone anyway. Really, everyone should just install an adblocker, and whitelist sites that are non-invasive, don't track, and that you want to support. Then the responsibility isn't on advertisers not to track us, it's on citizens to whitelist sites that they genuinely should be supporting.
  - Crespyl 9y ago
    I think you're right that "not being tracked" should be the default, in so much as having an adblocker and blacklisting known trackers should be defaults. These are things that my user-agent should be doing automatically to protect me and improve my experience. On the other hand, DNT is intended to be an opt-in polite request for other agents to change their usual behavior. An adblocker or tracking blocker at the browser/user-agent level does nothing to change how the servers that I do connect to behave. It just alters the behavior of my browser to not contact at all unrelated third parties. With DNT, my user-agent still contacts those third parties, but with a request to alter their default behavior. "Please, give me adco.com/somead, but please don't correlate this request with other information you have on me, etc." I do think there's a possible place for something like that, but it has to be opt-in or nobody will listen to it. Trivial examples of other "please deviate from your default behavior" requests are things like "show desktop version" on mobile browsers, Accept/Accept-Language (where supported), etc. On the gripping hand, it's also yet another bit to differentiate me from everyone else, and expecting polite and ethical behavior from advertising corporations probably really is doomed to failure.

awinter-py 9y ago

upvote != endorsement

awinter-py 9y ago

what if instead of using ad blockers we use ad amplifiers that downloaded 10 or 100 copies of video ads to make sure we got the data correct? Serving video is pretty expensive. How big are the ad networks' margins? Let's see who blinks first.

mdpopescu 9y ago
I think the internet is bad (and metered) in a lot of places in North America, so this would be counterproductive. However, it might work in Europe.
- djrogers 9y ago
  Very little of the internet in North America is 'bad', and in the US very little is metered beyond mobile. There are ISPs who technically have data caps, but very few people ever come close to them.
pjc50 9y ago
Ironically if you make this look like "click fraud" you can probably ensure that the site doesn't get paid for serving ads - but the ad network was still paid by their clients.
- awinter-py 9y ago
  If an ad network marks a click as fraudulent but still charges the advertiser, aren't they guilty of fraud as well? That seems like risky behavior for a company.
kodablah 9y ago
See https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam
- awinter-py 9y ago
  Ok, this seems like click fraud. I'm just proposing downloading videos multiple times to ensure a good copy.

10165 9y ago

Commenters are confusing ads versus tracking. Remember that it is possible to track users without the use of ads. A browser written by an organization that profits from ad revenue or collecting user information (hereafter "well-known browser") will load elements, e.g., images, in a web page automatically. No user interactivity is required. The user need not "click" anything. The user may not even be able to see the element loaded. Email clients supporting HTML email can do the same thing, loading images automatically, hence suporting a method of tracking. This is a very old method but still widely used. What if the user is not using a "well-known browser"? What if those elements will not be loaded automatically? Will these methods of tracking still work? All methods of tracking, other than IP addresses in access logs, rely on assumptions. Many rely on assumptions about usage of a "well-known browser". The assumption re: automatically loaded elements, "beacons" or whatever one wants to call them, is that the user is using a "well-known browser" that will load elements automatically. If the user is not using a "well-known browser", all bets are off? Another example is the HTTP header "fingerprint". HTTP headers are tied to "well-known browsers". What if suddenly all users decided to only send the same minimal headers? In the way that some server software might try to hide its version (e.g., BIND) imagine that users decided to hide their client software version. Aside from IP addresses, many methods of web tracking are heavily reliant on assumptions about use of "well-known browsers" and the behavior of those browsers. Could these assumptions ever fail to be true? Can users think for themselves? The www as a medium for exchanging information or even doing commerce does not necessarily require the use of any particular browser. That "requirement" is only imposed by certain sites on the www, for reasons that may ultimatley benefit the site owner more than its users. No such "requirement" is imposed by the www itself. Thinking of this in terms of "a carrot and a stick", as far as I have seen using the www since 1993 there is only a carrot in the form of a "well-known browser". There is no stick. Users are free to make HTTP requests using any client they choose, including ones that do not expose them to advertising or tracking. Such clients may not require an "adblocker" because they do not requests elements automatically. There used to be and perhaps there still is a never-ending battle between commercial entities over which is the "default browser" in a graphical OS. Certain companies tried to coax users into using certain "well-known browsers". There was even a large antitrust case in the US over this issue. The implication seemed to be that if not set by default users might otherwise choose some other HTTP client to interact with the www. In those days one company wanted to sell a browser as enterprise software. Today that browser is owned by a "non-profit" organization of salaried employees. Other well-known browsers are owned by "for profit" (subject to taxation) commercial entities with thousands of employees. Today, these well-known browsers are "free". And yet these browsers are written by salaried employees, not open-source project volunteers. These entities continue to market their "free" browsers aggressively to users. As a user, ask yourself why. Ads? Tracking?

shmerl 9y ago

Well, ad blockers are still here.

lawl 9y ago

If you take a look at any fingerprinting code in the wild, ALL of them use your DNT setting as another bit to track you. It had the exact opposite effect it intended to have.

politician 9y ago

(Kicking around an idea to build this:) Would anybody be interested in a local DNS server that automatically updated its list of black-holed domains through a mechanism that preserved your privacy? (Assuming, of course, a decentralized representation of the block lists.) Would anybody be willing to sell their attention by accepting payment (BTC), perhaps through a dutch auction, to re-enable a black-holed domain for a time-limited period? (Hand-waving the mechanism for ensuring that the domain was actually whitelisted.) I'd personally be interested in the former, and would likely use the latter - even though I find it hilariously unlikely that Ad Networks or Web Sites would participate in bidding for my attention directly.

victorvation 9y ago
Large ad publishers such as Google and Facebook are already doing the equivalent of auctioning users' attention by proxy of views, clicks, and conversions through their existing ad delivery methods.
- politician 9y ago
  Wouldn't you rather be in control?
shuntress 9y ago
If you don't already know about it, definitely check out https://pi-hole.net/ https://pi-hole.net/ I'm not totally clear on where their blacklist comes from but their mainpage claims "Known ad-serving domains are pulled from third party sources and compiled into one list" This is pretty much exactly your first suggestion and seems like it would be an excellent platform on which to launch your second suggestion.
- stordoff 9y ago
  Default block lists appear to be: https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole/wiki/Customising-sources-for-ad-lists https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole/wiki/Customising-sources-... The most comprehensive of the lists appears to be https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts , which is the same list I use for DNS filtering on my DD-WRT router. Seems to work pretty well.

theprop 9y ago

I always suspected Mozilla pushed Do Not Track to undermine online privacy. It was a doomed idea from the start -- all DNT does is politely ask a website not to track you. Setting their browser to DNT on did give tens of millions of Firefox users the illusion they were getting a high level of privacy (so they presumably would stick to Firefox) even though it didn't actually do very much.

Chaebixi 9y ago
> I always suspected Mozilla pushed Do Not Track to undermine online privacy. What motivation does Mozilla have to want to "undermine online privacy?" Of all the major browser vendors, they seem the least coupled to the privacy-invading ad ecosystem.
- theprop 9y ago
  The Mozilla that was using your browsing history to target new tab page ads to you? That's "least" coupled to the privacy-invading ecosystem? That gets hundreds of millions of dollars a year from Google & Yahoo/Microsoft in search revenues without pushing them to provide a genuine private search?
  - Chaebixi 9y ago
    > The Mozilla that was using your browsing history to target new tab page ads to you? That's "least" coupled to the privacy-invading ecosystem? Yeah it's the least coupled, because the major alternatives (e.g. Google) literally run the privacy-invading ad networks. Mozilla walked back from the tab-page ads more than a year ago. > without pushing them to provide a genuine private search? How much leverage do you think Mozilla has with the search engines? Google canceled their deal with them because they are so dominant and Chrome has been so successful. Mozilla needs revenue to keep the lights on, and the search engines are the source of it.

djrogers 9y ago

What a shock - the voluntary and arbitrarily interpreted 'feature' designed by advertising companies failed to protect anyone's privacy...