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If you look at the PR they sent to Homebrew, they defined it as an alias for their existing flags for turning off analytics. That doesn't look like an overreach

by jefftk 5y ago

If you look at the PR they sent to Homebrew, they defined it as an alias for their existing flags for turning off analytics. That doesn't look like an overreach to me? https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/pull/6745/commits/f255f63d40da7e9d3acc13683315a9aab2ef540b https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/pull/6745/commits/f255f63d4...

floatingatoll 5y ago
The overreach is in expanding the original mission of DNT, which was to request that sites not harvest a user’s data for targeted advertising: http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2011/01/history-of-do-not-track-header.html http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2011/01/history-of-do-not-track-... Expanding that to mean “do not reveal the user’s IP address” is a significant expansion of the original meaning, having little to do with the protection against being individually tracked that the DNT header was designed for. Asking Homebrew to disable analytics has nothing to do with targeted advertising opt-outs, but supports the ideological goal of the authors in promoting their new idea that revealing the existence of the user is “tracking”. That expansion exceeds the scope of the definition of “tracking” as used to reference targeted advertising and marketing, something that is not applicable to the Homebrew project’s existing flag in any way. Attempting to promote their beliefs by aliasing those two concepts together - tracking protection against targeted advertising, versus disabling telemetry and auto update - is therefore overreach to me, especially when presented without this context to projects such as Homebrew and others in pull requests, and I think it will ultimately lead to their effort’s failure. To me, this is all a direct consequence of their attempt to ride the coattails of the failed DNT effort by reusing its key phrase “do not track”. They should have used a different name. In a few seconds, I can think of a pretty great one that still acronyms to DNT, so clearly creativity wasn’t the obstacle here. Instead they chose to anchor to “Do Not Track” and it’s too late now to change that. We’ll see what happens.
- jefftk 5y ago
  > the original mission of DNT, which was to request that sites not harvest a user’s data for targeted advertising It was a lot more amorphous than that. Some of the people behind DNT did have that particular meaning in mind, but others had different sets of things they wanted to prevent. There was enough disagreement on this point that they didn't manage to get consensus on anything more than "this specification does not define requirements on what a recipient needs to do to comply with a user's expressed tracking preference" -- https://www.w3.org/TR/tracking-dnt/ https://www.w3.org/TR/tracking-dnt/
  - floatingatoll 5y ago
    That seems like particularly poor quicksand to build a new "do not track" effort upon, yes; adding yet another interpretation worsens things and ties this new effort to a failed effort's legacy.
    - jefftk 5y ago
      Not disagreeing!

by jefftk 5y ago

floatingatoll 5y ago

The overreach is in expanding the original mission of DNT, which was to request that sites not harvest a user’s data for targeted advertising: http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2011/01/history-of-do-not-track-header.html http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2011/01/history-of-do-not-track-... Expanding that to mean “do not reveal the user’s IP address” is a significant expansion of the original meaning, having little to do with the protection against being individually tracked that the DNT header was designed for. Asking Homebrew to disable analytics has nothing to do with targeted advertising opt-outs, but supports the ideological goal of the authors in promoting their new idea that revealing the existence of the user is “tracking”. That expansion exceeds the scope of the definition of “tracking” as used to reference targeted advertising and marketing, something that is not applicable to the Homebrew project’s existing flag in any way. Attempting to promote their beliefs by aliasing those two concepts together - tracking protection against targeted advertising, versus disabling telemetry and auto update - is therefore overreach to me, especially when presented without this context to projects such as Homebrew and others in pull requests, and I think it will ultimately lead to their effort’s failure. To me, this is all a direct consequence of their attempt to ride the coattails of the failed DNT effort by reusing its key phrase “do not track”. They should have used a different name. In a few seconds, I can think of a pretty great one that still acronyms to DNT, so clearly creativity wasn’t the obstacle here. Instead they chose to anchor to “Do Not Track” and it’s too late now to change that. We’ll see what happens.

jefftk 5y ago
> the original mission of DNT, which was to request that sites not harvest a user’s data for targeted advertising It was a lot more amorphous than that. Some of the people behind DNT did have that particular meaning in mind, but others had different sets of things they wanted to prevent. There was enough disagreement on this point that they didn't manage to get consensus on anything more than "this specification does not define requirements on what a recipient needs to do to comply with a user's expressed tracking preference" -- https://www.w3.org/TR/tracking-dnt/ https://www.w3.org/TR/tracking-dnt/
- floatingatoll 5y ago
  That seems like particularly poor quicksand to build a new "do not track" effort upon, yes; adding yet another interpretation worsens things and ties this new effort to a failed effort's legacy.
  - jefftk 5y ago
    Not disagreeing!