5 ms·
And, as with DNT, by disabling it you'll just add another feature for identifying you.
by staticassertion 5y ago
And, as with DNT, by disabling it you'll just add another feature for identifying you.
- Macha 5y ago1 bit seems pretty preferable to something which people will pretty quickly find a way to turn into a user ID
- staticassertion 5y agoMaybe - it depends on how much that bit is weighted.
- rascul 5y agoI thought it was the other way around. As it was generally disabled by default, enabling it gave another data point for fingerprinting. But maybe I don't recall correctly.
- staticassertion 5y agoEither way it works. It's just a feature. What the big issue was was that some browsers would enable it by default and some wouldn't, and then you'd have differences across versions, etc. So it became a more powerful feature.
- ekr____ 5y agoThere was a discussion in PATCG Wednesday about precisely this topic. Briefly, it should be possible to "disable" this feature by instead encrypting a random match key, which would look the same as having it enabled but merely not be useful for measurement. Obviously, one would need to work through the details of how to make this work in a complete protocol, so this is a little handwavy, but it's definitely a consideration.
- staticassertion 5y agoThat's good to hear - that was such a silly flaw in DNT, along with the entire concept being idiotic.
- mindslight 5y agoI don't see any other way to do DNT without creating an extra facet of identifying information. It's entire point is to convey that information. Contrast with say "allow notifications" which lots of privacy advice says to leave to "ask" otherwise you needlessly add an identifying facet. That preference should be invisible to the sandboxed program, with unwanted notifications just going to /dev/null. Also DNT is not useless modulo new human rights legislation like the GDPR. I would hope that data protection regulators settle on seeing DNT as an explicit sign of non-consent, and punish websites who try to fraudulently obtain consent with annoying popups etc.