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Microsoft turning DNT on for all Windows users automatically pretty much killed the movement's momentum. While privacy as the default has strong arguments going
by vatueil 8y ago
Microsoft turning DNT on for all Windows users automatically pretty much killed the movement's momentum. While privacy as the default has strong arguments going for it, as a practical matter since DNT was supposed to be an intentional signal Microsoft's mass-flagging effectively drowned the signal in noise. And those who didn't know better lauded them for it, too.
- Lio 8y agoEven if Microsoft turned DNT on by default Google/Facebook should still respect it. They could ask users to turn it off in the same way they bug people to install their software. Alternatively they could work on business models that don’t rely on collecting massive amounts of personal data about people who don’t want them to do that. E.g. Basic Attention Tokens and others.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- vatueil 8y agoSure, you could wish for that, but if we could have everything you wished for we probably wouldn't need DNT in the first place. Since DNT was specifically raised, bringing up how Microsoft's hug of death killed it seemed pertinent.
- Lio 8y agoThat still sounds like we have a problem with Google/Facebook and not with Microsoft turning it on by default. The default behaviour for Google/Facebook should be not to track people that aren't logged in to their services. That should go double for people who are not just neutral but explicitly telling them "really, don't track me" in a header. There is no justification of "we're just improving services" for people who are telling you "I don't want to use your service and I don't want to help you improve your services."
- threatofrain 8y agoBut doesn't this signal also make you easier to track?
- cpeterso 8y agoApache landed a patch to ignore the DNT header from the versions of IE that enabled DNT by default. Thus websites would only see DNT headers when for users that they know manually opted into DNT.