5 ms·

To be fair though, don't you remember how the DNT header worked really well for everybody involved, and how all these advertisers today universally respect it,

To be fair though, don't you remember how the DNT header worked really well for everybody involved, and how all these advertisers today universally respect it, and how they totally didn't abandon the entire concept as soon as it started seeing mainstream use and platforms started turning it on by default? What could go wrong if we give them another spot at the table? I mean, PRAM has already released so many good plans, like... a mission statement. But that counts! I mean, come on, it has 'Responsible' right in its name!

sli 6y ago
DNT just became another fingerprinting datapoint, so it ended up being better to just set it to whatever the critical mass is using (which is typically off).
pornel 6y ago
We've even had P3P spec that allowed users to say in browser's settings "I don't want your tracking cookies", without any consent pop-ups. It was even implemented in Internet Explorer! And then Google found a loophole in the P3P syntax, and abused it to bypass it entirely. Fun times.
madeofpalk 6y ago
The problem with DNT was that it was off by default, advertisers didnt support it, and that it was yet another bit advertises used to create IDs for anon users.
- grishka 6y ago
  The only real solution is to do away with third-party cookies being on by default. There are very narrow use cases that are beneficial to the end user, but the user-hostile ones far outweigh those. DNT is based on a flawed assumption that ad tech has good faith. In the real world, though, you don't ask for privacy, you take it.
  - danShumway 6y ago
    This is the real lesson from DNT: you can not trust bad actors to be good. Every time we see these voluntary initiatives about how advertisers are going to be responsible from now on... they can't. The industry will never be responsible, left to their own devices they'll use DNT as a tracking mechanism, and then justify it by saying that they need to remain competitive. There is no such thing as a responsible advertising industry, it doesn't exist. They've demonstrated over and over again that they have to be treated like malicious actors, they are incapable of self-regulating.
renewiltord 6y ago
We respected it in our ad pixel server. DNTs didn't get tracked, just returned 200 blank, no logs generated. It didn't matter, though, in the end. Didn't get us positive/negative attention, users didn't really care, browsers stopped supporting it, and then it was just dead code. Left the guard clause in, in the end, because of some misguided need to "do the right thing". It's just dead code. I'd just get rid of it now. Despite online Internet attention, users don't care about this stuff so long as it's wicked fast (response times < 20 ms) and doesn't interfere with the thing they want. They want the thing it enables and they'll happily pay the price. People online who talk about all this stuff visit whacky sites, get angry at being infected with god knows what from some shit Forbes.com or some crap or some porno site and then flip out at "Google for tracking me" or some crap. Glad I'm not in that industry anymore. No one outside it knows what it does or enables.
- m463 6y ago
  > users don't care about this stuff we do.
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    Right, should clarify that I mean "Users do not act in a manner that reveals they care about this". I.e. the majority of users won't use a product that's more compliant with the spec over one that does an extra thing they'd like.
    - WorldMaker 6y ago
      Users don't have much choice in which ad streams they see. Publishers had the choice and seemed indifferent, but it feels weird to blame users for turning on a feature and not noticing a difference when that feature didn't work because most publishers failed to act on that feature / make it a requirement of their ad buys.
- pseudalopex 6y ago
  Why is Facebook alarmed about users getting a choice if users are happy to be tracked?
dialtone 6y ago
Yeah the DNT header didn't work due in large part to middle men (like routers or anti-virus tools) flipping that bit without asking the user in automatic, or again broad decisions, such as from Microsoft, of flipping the default of that header without asking users. Obviously if one side chooses to just do what they want, the other side is free to do what they want as well. This whole situation needs people to sit down and talk these issues through, like it's happening inside the W3C. It doesn't need a few companies to strong arm whatever is better for them financially (Apple makes no money off of current ads, but they'll force themselves in the picture with their attribution tool and will get more paid app revenue out of this, pretty clear incentive).
- danShumway 6y ago
  > Yeah the DNT header didn't work due in large part to middle men (like routers or anti-virus tools) flipping that bit without asking the user in automatic A privacy option that's not allowed to be turned on by default based on user data and likely preferences isn't a real privacy option. Advertisers are the kings of trying to guess what users want, did they really think that browsers wouldn't be allowed to do the same with request headers? This argument comes up a lot, and I'd debate it, but I also think behind the surface-level objections, the heart of the argument basically boils down to, "we didn't realize that people were going to use this thing." The advertising industry was happy to have an opt-out as long as not too many people used it. Once it started getting turned on by default (because of course a user who's installing antivirus or privacy tools wants DNT to be enabled), Microsoft just became an excuse to abandon the whole thing. If Microsoft had never turned DNT on by default, but the majority of users had sought out the option and turned it on, then advertisers would have come up with an excuse. Their participation with DNT was a compromise: "you can have a few of these users that probably run adblockers anyway, and in exchange, we want you to get off of our back about everything else." For these people, respecting DNT always depended on it not being adopted. And that's why trusting them to talk about "responsible ads" or "consumer choice" is a waste of time. They know what they want the consumer choice on privacy to be, and they will only offer that choice as long as the average consumer chooses what they think the 'right' option is. If advertisers discover that the average consumer doesn't want to be tracked, then all of their talk about sitting down and having a dialog is going to go away.

sli 6y ago

DNT just became another fingerprinting datapoint, so it ended up being better to just set it to whatever the critical mass is using (which is typically off).

pornel 6y ago

We've even had P3P spec that allowed users to say in browser's settings "I don't want your tracking cookies", without any consent pop-ups. It was even implemented in Internet Explorer! And then Google found a loophole in the P3P syntax, and abused it to bypass it entirely. Fun times.

madeofpalk 6y ago

The problem with DNT was that it was off by default, advertisers didnt support it, and that it was yet another bit advertises used to create IDs for anon users.

grishka 6y ago
The only real solution is to do away with third-party cookies being on by default. There are very narrow use cases that are beneficial to the end user, but the user-hostile ones far outweigh those. DNT is based on a flawed assumption that ad tech has good faith. In the real world, though, you don't ask for privacy, you take it.
- danShumway 6y ago
  This is the real lesson from DNT: you can not trust bad actors to be good. Every time we see these voluntary initiatives about how advertisers are going to be responsible from now on... they can't. The industry will never be responsible, left to their own devices they'll use DNT as a tracking mechanism, and then justify it by saying that they need to remain competitive. There is no such thing as a responsible advertising industry, it doesn't exist. They've demonstrated over and over again that they have to be treated like malicious actors, they are incapable of self-regulating.

renewiltord 6y ago

We respected it in our ad pixel server. DNTs didn't get tracked, just returned 200 blank, no logs generated. It didn't matter, though, in the end. Didn't get us positive/negative attention, users didn't really care, browsers stopped supporting it, and then it was just dead code. Left the guard clause in, in the end, because of some misguided need to "do the right thing". It's just dead code. I'd just get rid of it now. Despite online Internet attention, users don't care about this stuff so long as it's wicked fast (response times < 20 ms) and doesn't interfere with the thing they want. They want the thing it enables and they'll happily pay the price. People online who talk about all this stuff visit whacky sites, get angry at being infected with god knows what from some shit Forbes.com or some crap or some porno site and then flip out at "Google for tracking me" or some crap. Glad I'm not in that industry anymore. No one outside it knows what it does or enables.

m463 6y ago
> users don't care about this stuff we do.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Right, should clarify that I mean "Users do not act in a manner that reveals they care about this". I.e. the majority of users won't use a product that's more compliant with the spec over one that does an extra thing they'd like.
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    Users don't have much choice in which ad streams they see. Publishers had the choice and seemed indifferent, but it feels weird to blame users for turning on a feature and not noticing a difference when that feature didn't work because most publishers failed to act on that feature / make it a requirement of their ad buys.
pseudalopex 6y ago
Why is Facebook alarmed about users getting a choice if users are happy to be tracked?

dialtone 6y ago

Yeah the DNT header didn't work due in large part to middle men (like routers or anti-virus tools) flipping that bit without asking the user in automatic, or again broad decisions, such as from Microsoft, of flipping the default of that header without asking users. Obviously if one side chooses to just do what they want, the other side is free to do what they want as well. This whole situation needs people to sit down and talk these issues through, like it's happening inside the W3C. It doesn't need a few companies to strong arm whatever is better for them financially (Apple makes no money off of current ads, but they'll force themselves in the picture with their attribution tool and will get more paid app revenue out of this, pretty clear incentive).

danShumway 6y ago
> Yeah the DNT header didn't work due in large part to middle men (like routers or anti-virus tools) flipping that bit without asking the user in automatic A privacy option that's not allowed to be turned on by default based on user data and likely preferences isn't a real privacy option. Advertisers are the kings of trying to guess what users want, did they really think that browsers wouldn't be allowed to do the same with request headers? This argument comes up a lot, and I'd debate it, but I also think behind the surface-level objections, the heart of the argument basically boils down to, "we didn't realize that people were going to use this thing." The advertising industry was happy to have an opt-out as long as not too many people used it. Once it started getting turned on by default (because of course a user who's installing antivirus or privacy tools wants DNT to be enabled), Microsoft just became an excuse to abandon the whole thing. If Microsoft had never turned DNT on by default, but the majority of users had sought out the option and turned it on, then advertisers would have come up with an excuse. Their participation with DNT was a compromise: "you can have a few of these users that probably run adblockers anyway, and in exchange, we want you to get off of our back about everything else." For these people, respecting DNT always depended on it not being adopted. And that's why trusting them to talk about "responsible ads" or "consumer choice" is a waste of time. They know what they want the consumer choice on privacy to be, and they will only offer that choice as long as the average consumer chooses what they think the 'right' option is. If advertisers discover that the average consumer doesn't want to be tracked, then all of their talk about sitting down and having a dialog is going to go away.