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I always thought the Do Not Track option was naive. It did nothing to stop tracking except beg.
by MiddleEndian 7y ago
I always thought the Do Not Track option was naive. It did nothing to stop tracking except beg.
- doc_gunthrop 7y agoThe same could be said of robot.txt files.
- kgwxd 7y agoThe only thing more naive is the cookie notice law.
- MiddleEndian 7y agoI also hate that law. I block cookie notifications as well. My browser can alert me if I want to be notified about cookies.
- jszymborski 7y agoIn a sane world, DNT would be opt-out and enforced by legislation.
- egdod 7y agoThere's legislation to stop robocalls. How many have you gotten in the last 24 hours? I've had 3, and it's been a pretty typical day.
- nutjob2 7y agoMeanwhile I haven't gotten any in many years, because my spam call filter works a treat, and always has. Though I am thinking of turning it off and putting up a "Hello? Hello? Sorry I can't hear you could you repeat that. Uhha, go on..." recorded message about 5 minutes long, just to waste their resources. That would actually be a promising addition to a spam filter.
- IceWreck 7y agoAnd that spam call filter probably requires proprietary software, which has access to your call logs and theres every chance that the spam filter app company can steal your data. > Though I am thinking of turning it off and putting up a "Hello? Hello? Sorry I can't hear you could you repeat that. Uhha, go on..." recorded message about 5 minutes long, just to waste their resources. That would actually be a promising addition to a spam filter. This a nice idea but on the rare occasion that your filter incorrectly blocks the wrong person, you might be annoying someone who really needs to talk to you.
- tylerl 7y agoAndroid phones do it automatically, assuming your carrier hasn't monkeyed with the phone app. I think Google keeps a spam probability score for callers' phone numbers based on how many people have marked a call as spam.
- tatersolid 7y agoSpam call numbers are randomly generated. Blacklisting can’t work without collateral damage.
- egdod 7y agoI’m surprised it helps at all. Why wouldn’t a robocaller generate a new random number every time?
- manigandham 7y agoThey do. The common strategy is to pick numbers with the same area code to pretend to be legal, and some advanced callers try and pick numbers that match even more recognizable digits (like your office). All this traffic is a major source of revenue for VOIP operators.
- lucb1e 7y agoI never had one in my life. I'm 27 and have had the same number since I was ~13 or so. I did get a few spam text messages, maybe one every three years.
- 1000units 7y agoThe richest companies on the planet don't robocall me, but they do stalk me all over the internet and wherever I bring my phone, which I consider worse.
- distances 7y agoI have never received one. Nor have I gotten any SMS spam.
- nutjob2 7y agoJust like legislation stops robbery and murder.
- MiddleEndian 7y agoExcept DNT is more like saying you can murder anyone unless they ask you politely not to murder them.
- rapind 7y agoWithout legislation you'd have large tech corporations running robbery networks tracking everyone's behaviour and and recommending who it would be most profitable to rob today based on their behaviour, location, etc... oh wait.
- jakelazaroff 7y agoYou don't think there would be way more robbery and murder if it were legal?
- cameronbrown 7y agoNow that's getting into some serious philosophy there. In this respect, would we be moral people without it being codified in law? I'd like to lean towards yes, because before state's law it was religious law. Humans have always projected their morals via the powers at be.
- danShumway 7y agoLegislation doesn't stop criminals. The best way to stop browser tracking online is to make it technologically impossible for malicious actors to track the browser. Everything else is just a band-aide.
- danieldk 7y agoLegislation doesn't stop criminals. But these are incorporated entities. If proper privacy laws are/were put in place and enforced, they would have to honor DNT. This is as much a failing of these companies to respect privacy as it was the failing of governments to protect privacy of their citizens. Besides violating privacy, ad networks have also been a proxy for malware. They should have been sued into oblivion for that as well. I agree that since the proper means have failed, blocking is the best solution. Do people who are not computer savvy a favor and install a proper ad blocker for them. We can do much better than 26%.
- danShumway 7y agoIt's a matter of what order you want to tackle things in. I'm not interested in only stopping the worst actors. I want to stop all tracking, and if I can't, I'll settle for stopping some of the worst actors through solutions like legislation. I understand that some people come from the opposite direction -- they try to stop the obvious bad actors with laws, and if those laws fail, then they'll look for solutions that put control in the hands of individuals. I don't dislike those people, but my perspective is that people who focus on tracking by corporations don't have a good perspective of the entire problem. > Do people who are not computer savvy a favor and install a proper ad blocker for them. We can do much better than 26%. Amen on that. I'd like to see the ad industry collapse, but that's a separate conversation. I'm not convinced that pervasive advertising to the degree we currently see is good for society as a whole. I would encourage people to block ads even if they didn't include any trackers at all. I would even block ads off of one-way mediums like the radio if I could.
- tedunangst 7y agoMicrosoft made it opt out and people screamed.
- dredmorbius 7y agoPeople, or advertisers?
- kibwen 7y agoThis misses the real intention of DNT, which was to give browser vendors plausible deniability when advertisers inevitably rejected it. The one and only reason that browsers (with the exception of Google's) don't block ads out of the box (like they do for pop-ups) is out of concern that ad-supported websites will explicitly blacklist their user agents, driving away their users and causing the browsers to lose marketshare.[1] DNT was the shot across the bow that said "we can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way". The obvious outcome was that the ad networks would choose to ignore it, which formed the foundational justification for gradually introducing ever-stricter policies reining in ads by default. [1] The inverse is true as well: the nuclear option of any browser whose marketshare sinks to the point of unsustainability will be to immediately introduce on-by-default adblockers, since at that point they have nothing left to lose.
- skybrian 7y agoIncognito mode enforces what do-not-track was supposed to do, and there, the cat-and-mouse game continues. But the reason Chrome can continue to support this is that most people don't use it.