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Yes, this looks like DNT all over again. Just another header that quickly becomes meaningless, wasting terabytes of bandwidth all over the world for no good rea
by kijin 5y ago
Yes, this looks like DNT all over again. Just another header that quickly becomes meaningless, wasting terabytes of bandwidth all over the world for no good reason.
- wolverine876 5y agoDNT does nothing technically, but it has political power and that's where privacy happens to a great degree. When 70% of users say 'do not track me', it is hard to claim that they don't care about privacy.
- m45t3r 5y agoUnless a big vendor (coff Microsoft coff) decides to enable it by default, them it becomes meaningless.
- Analemma_ 5y agoIt was meaningless from the beginning: DNT was always nothing but an Evil Bit. You’re getting mad at Microsoft for pointing out that the emperor had no clothes.
- lupire 5y agoIt was an Evil Bit becaut it didn't have the force of law behind it. Now we have cookie laws.
- M2Ys4U 5y agoWe had "cookie laws" when DNT was created, too.
- Dylan16807 5y agoThere were people promising to implement it. That's a lot better than nothing.
- WorldMaker 5y agoIs it? The whole point to this thread is that none of the big players stood by their "promises" for longer than a few months. Especially Google's hypocrisy of promoting DNT in Chrome and knowing full well their adtech teams would ignore it as soon as they had an excuse. (Microsoft and Mozilla enabling it by default sure was a "good" excuse, despite that obviously being the best interest of the users.)
- Dylan16807 5y agoIt's possible they were looking for an excuse and lying. But enabling it by default definitely seemed to defeat the entire point of the fragile agreement. It doesn't matter to them whether it's better for users.
- WorldMaker 5y agoMy entire point is that if it was a "fragile agreement" it wasn't in good faith and it was lying and waiting for any excuse to break it, by definition. It doesn't matter what excuse broke it. It was always a bad faith attempt to score some regulatory points and it was never about actually doing good for users. They never should have offered a "standard" for such a "fragile agreement" they didn't really believe in, and everything they said about it was hypocrisy.
- Dylan16807 5y agoI meant a fragile good faith agreement. I haven't seen any particularly compelling evidence it wasn't in good faith. It was an "attempt to score some regulatory points and it was never about actually doing good for users". But that was always obvious because it was companies doing it. It still would have done good if it was implemented.
- WorldMaker 5y agoAgain, it was implemented and it didn't do any good, on purpose as soon as users tried to actually use it. It's not a good faith agreement if "we agree to do this only so long as the setting to enable it is in the sub-sub-basement of the browser locked in a closet marked 'Beware of Leopard'". If it wasn't "oh no a browser enabled it by default" it would have been "oh no a tutorial went viral on social media telling people how there isn't really a leopard and that everyone should just open that closet and click the button", because again the excuse doesn't matter why they stopped supporting it they never planned to support it for more than the theory of it. There's always some other excuse. It was only ever a "heisenberg feature": it can either not be used or it could just not exist. I'm saying it's not possible at all to design a "heisenberg feature" like that in any possible definition of "good faith". If it wasn't designed to be used by even a paltry 5% of users at the time they balked and stopped supporting it, it wasn't designed in good faith. There's no way to look at that and think they meant anything about any of their promises when they said they'd support it.
- wolverine876 5y agoYes, but it's not hard to ignore DNT on Microsoft user agents, which are a small part of the population.
- fomine3 5y agowhich were a large part of the population at the time.