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I think there are two different issues here which you eliding by labeling this as "settled back in 1996." What I would say was "settled in 1996" was the fact th

I think there are two different issues here which you eliding by labeling this as "settled back in 1996." What I would say was "settled in 1996" was the fact that cookies are a useful technical measure to enable websites to save state, and users wanted features like login persistence across browser sessions, etc. I don't think that "unlimited user tracking by advertising networks, regardless of good-faith user efforts to limit data tracking" was at all part of any tacit agreements reached by the internet community. The principle that communication networks should be transparent in how they operate, and allow users of the network to meaningfully control their interactions with them is a meta-principle that is pretty clearly implicit in the design of the internet, and I don't think the current widespread use of tracking technologies and data analysis without informed user consent is consistent with those principles.

shalmanese 15y ago
Fighting against user tracking strikes me as about as futile as fighting against piracy. Computers are intrinsically designed to store, aggregate, analyze and share vast quantities of information in the hopes of deriving meaning from them. Trying to derive a legislative solution to a technological force of nature works as well as you would expect in both of these circumstances.
- huxley 15y ago
  You have to pick your battles. "It's a force of nature" is only a good argument against a policy when it is accompanied by other valid arguments. There are many things which are "only human nature" or "a force of nature" which for the sake of society and/or personal liberty we restrict. Saying "it's only a force of nature" won't get you far with a judge. And telling people that they can't use the internet if they value their privacy is an unreasonable restriction on personal liberty. Period. I agree that Google can user track, but only so far, and if they need to go to such extremes, we need rules, guidelines or even laws to draw the line very starkly.
  - shalmanese 15y ago
    I'm not saying it's good or acceptable, just that I view the war on user tracking to go about as well as the current war on piracy has.

shalmanese 15y ago

Fighting against user tracking strikes me as about as futile as fighting against piracy. Computers are intrinsically designed to store, aggregate, analyze and share vast quantities of information in the hopes of deriving meaning from them. Trying to derive a legislative solution to a technological force of nature works as well as you would expect in both of these circumstances.

huxley 15y ago
You have to pick your battles. "It's a force of nature" is only a good argument against a policy when it is accompanied by other valid arguments. There are many things which are "only human nature" or "a force of nature" which for the sake of society and/or personal liberty we restrict. Saying "it's only a force of nature" won't get you far with a judge. And telling people that they can't use the internet if they value their privacy is an unreasonable restriction on personal liberty. Period. I agree that Google can user track, but only so far, and if they need to go to such extremes, we need rules, guidelines or even laws to draw the line very starkly.
- shalmanese 15y ago
  I'm not saying it's good or acceptable, just that I view the war on user tracking to go about as well as the current war on piracy has.