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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 bu

by 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.
  - staticassertion 9y ago
    > 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. Yeah, I considered bringing this up in my original post - DNT is garbage for a lot of reasons. One of the big ones being that it actually sucks for privacy, especially if it's not used a ton. It's one more thing that can make you trackable.
- greglindahl 9y ago
  There's no way to overblame Microsoft: There was an industry agreement that involved the compromise of DNT not being the default. Microsoft destroyed the entire agreement, which doesn't benefit consumers at all. Worked out great for the advertising and data-collection industries, though.
  - djrogers 9y ago
    There was no 'Industry agreement' or compromise - the whole DNT thing was a slice of cake thrown to us by the advertising industry to keep us quiet for a while.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - qb45 9y ago
      I don't know how relevant/important they were, but there were some advertisers who agreed to respect DNT provided it's set by the user. https://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-ticks-off-advertisers-with-ie10-do-not-track-policy/ https://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-ticks-off-advertisers-wi...
LeoNatan25 9y ago
What a nonsense apologetic approach. Define "the right thing"? Blocking tracking by default sounds like the "right thing" to me. I'm not sure how "being a good citizen on the internet" became synonymous with "bending over to advertising moguls" or "thinking about the poor starving blogger who must partake in that advertisement tracking ad tech nonsense and blocking that is taking food from his kids". Advertising and tracking blocking has become a gatekeeper of democracy on the internet these days. Unfortunately, with the idiotic political direction in USA (and USSC), I wouldn't be surprised if politicians are not bribed to introduce legislation against blocking advertisement ("it infringes on first amendment of Coca Cola!"), followed swiftly by "America's interests" - much of Europe.
- lordlimecat 9y ago
  "Blocking ads" is typically justified because the data is being sent to your computer, which is then rejecting parts of the data. The other side of this coin is that when you voluntarily send data to the server, what they do with it is generally their business (complying with local laws etc). If you want to "block tracking" you should prevent your computer from sending trackable data to the server. Complaining that theyre keeping data about you is tilting at windmills: good luck preventing it.
watwut 9y ago
Microsoft did the right thing. DNT just pretended to work before. Once Microsoft made it to be used, all pretension had stop. Privacy standard thay works as long as people are not using it and fails the moment they start to, is just a lie.

by dudus 9y ago

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.
- staticassertion 9y ago
  > 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. Yeah, I considered bringing this up in my original post - DNT is garbage for a lot of reasons. One of the big ones being that it actually sucks for privacy, especially if it's not used a ton. It's one more thing that can make you trackable.
greglindahl 9y ago
There's no way to overblame Microsoft: There was an industry agreement that involved the compromise of DNT not being the default. Microsoft destroyed the entire agreement, which doesn't benefit consumers at all. Worked out great for the advertising and data-collection industries, though.
- djrogers 9y ago
  There was no 'Industry agreement' or compromise - the whole DNT thing was a slice of cake thrown to us by the advertising industry to keep us quiet for a while.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - qb45 9y ago
    I don't know how relevant/important they were, but there were some advertisers who agreed to respect DNT provided it's set by the user. https://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-ticks-off-advertisers-with-ie10-do-not-track-policy/ https://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-ticks-off-advertisers-wi...

LeoNatan25 9y ago

What a nonsense apologetic approach. Define "the right thing"? Blocking tracking by default sounds like the "right thing" to me. I'm not sure how "being a good citizen on the internet" became synonymous with "bending over to advertising moguls" or "thinking about the poor starving blogger who must partake in that advertisement tracking ad tech nonsense and blocking that is taking food from his kids". Advertising and tracking blocking has become a gatekeeper of democracy on the internet these days. Unfortunately, with the idiotic political direction in USA (and USSC), I wouldn't be surprised if politicians are not bribed to introduce legislation against blocking advertisement ("it infringes on first amendment of Coca Cola!"), followed swiftly by "America's interests" - much of Europe.

lordlimecat 9y ago
"Blocking ads" is typically justified because the data is being sent to your computer, which is then rejecting parts of the data. The other side of this coin is that when you voluntarily send data to the server, what they do with it is generally their business (complying with local laws etc). If you want to "block tracking" you should prevent your computer from sending trackable data to the server. Complaining that theyre keeping data about you is tilting at windmills: good luck preventing it.

watwut 9y ago

Microsoft did the right thing. DNT just pretended to work before. Once Microsoft made it to be used, all pretension had stop. Privacy standard thay works as long as people are not using it and fails the moment they start to, is just a lie.