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. Thes

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.