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Even though it might in theory have been the best default for end-users, in practice they made DNT fail as a result because advertisers wanted users to make an
by treve 9y ago
Even though it might in theory have been the best default for end-users, in practice they made DNT fail as a result because advertisers wanted users to make an explicit choice instead of getting opted out by default. It's easy to blame the advertisers here, and sure.. you can argue that in this scenario they were the 'more evil' ones, but had Microsoft not made this choice, we ultimately could have ended up with a respected DNT header, which later on could have become a default anyway.
So I don't disagree that the decision might have come from a good place, but the end-result was not hard to predict and was ultimately not in the interest of users. It was incredibly dumb.
- Fnoord 9y agoI put my money on that being an excuse and ultimately a fallacy by the advertisers. There are a lot of things in life which you don't get to choose, and only get informed about when you look into them. There's much worse examples which are far more nefarious for end users. EULAs come to mind!! Contracts in general as well because they're so complex, you need a lawyer(bot) to understand.
- hobs 9y agoThis is a completely an excuse - advertisers would have looked to anything to disable and ignore DNT - "oh, not enough users use it for us to justify enabling it" etc. The end result of DNT was never going to be "advertisers were going to less ruthlessly track you" - that's a fantasy.
- belorn 9y agoThe advertisers chosen to ignore DNT. It don't matter if they decided to do so because they disliked the concept of DNT or if they did so because the OS manufactorers decided to change the opt-in to opt-out. The decision was made solely by the advertisers, and there the blame resides. If Microsoft had not made this choice then the advertisers could still have made the same decision. We will never know, and it doesn't really matter. Its a "what if" situation, and like many such "what if"s we are simply speculating about motives while not looking at the billions of dollar worth of obvious reasons why the advertisers wanted to ignore DNT.
- lurr 9y agoAdvertisers were never going to honor any significant portion of the population using DNT. The correct approach is to aggressively fight back with technology to prevent tracking.
- nteu09is34 9y ago> advertisers wanted users to make an explicit choice instead of getting opted out by default. Fuck advertisers! I want users to have to make an explicit choice to opt in to tracking instead of being opted in by default.