4 ms·

How was DNT a sham until IE screwed it up by making it opt-out?

by nodata 14y ago

jiggy2011 14y ago
If you are an ad company or a company that relies on ads in some way for revenue, what possible reason would you have for respecting it?
- TheHegemon 14y ago
  Generally because anyone tech savvy enough to opt out of it would be worth less to advertisers anyway.
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    I have no idea why that would be true? I assume pretty much anyone with enough money for an internet connection has some value to advertisers.
    - brokenparser 14y ago
      You still get advertisements, but with DNT they wouldn't be targeted to your profile.
  - jfoster 14y ago
    I'm not sure, but let's assume they are. Doesn't respecting do not track reduce their value even further? I'm not arguing that ad companies shouldn't respect so not track, just considering the incentives and disincentives in front of them.
    - 3825 14y ago
      The main motivation is to have some standing ground to prevent legislation.
misterbwong 14y ago
I've seen this repeated a couple times and I'd like to know the reasoning on this argument. Is making DNT opt-out bad? Seems like MS would catch more flak had they made it opt-in, though I may just be misunderstanding the situation
- B-Con 14y ago
  > Is making DNT opt-out bad? The common argument is that it is: 1) Advertisers won't give up tracking across the board. It's too lucrative for them. 2) Most users don't care about the setting that much. 3) Enabling it for default for the majority of users will cause present advertisers with a majority of users who they cannot track. 4) Per (1), the advertisers will then elect to ignore DNT. 5) DNT becomes a useless ignored flag and a waste of time. Instead, if it's opt-in: 1) Most people don't bother turning it on. 2) The advertisers face pressure to comply with the ones who do. 3) People who do turn it on then enjoy the benefits. Also, the DNT specification explicitly says that DNT should not be turned on by default, for these very reasons.
  - neumann_alfred 14y ago
    How is that not blackmail? You might as well say if everybody started reading the list of ingredients of food they buy and take them seriously, corporations would just start to lie and put whatever they want in there. Sure, maybe some would, but that's what jail is for.
    - Dylan16807 14y ago
      People intentionally and knowingly reading the ingredients / turning on DNT is the correct method. I'm struggling to find a valid food-ingredient-analogy but it would be very different from your scenario. It would have to involve Microsoft auto-scanning the ingredients without the user ever turning this feature on. Then Microsoft would have to do something with the results that hurts/disparages certain food producers. And then the food producers would stop listing ingredients in a form that Microsoft can OCR, not lie about them.
  - 14y ago
Firehed 14y ago
I think it was a sham either way (without legislation, there's really no reason for anyone to adhere to the requests, and as users we have little to no way of knowing if our requests are being fulfilled), but MS screwed the pooch here by completely violating the intent and implementation of the spec. Sending "DNT: 1" in your request header means "please do not track me". Sending "DNT: 0" means "I don't care if you track me". Sending no DNT header (every request on a browser where the header is unsupported or a browser has not received a preference from a user) means "I have not expressed a tracking preference or do not have the ability to do so". By having a default sent either way as MS did, it violates the semantic meaning of the header, meaning that the receiving server can't distinguish between "no preference" and "don't track"/"go ahead". It's like a pair of radio buttons: selecting neither is valid, but once you've made a selection you can't get it back to an unselected state.

How was DNT a sham until IE screwed it up by making it opt-out?

by nodata 14y ago

How was DNT a sham until IE screwed it up by making it opt-out?

jiggy2011 14y ago

If you are an ad company or a company that relies on ads in some way for revenue, what possible reason would you have for respecting it?

TheHegemon 14y ago
Generally because anyone tech savvy enough to opt out of it would be worth less to advertisers anyway.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  I have no idea why that would be true? I assume pretty much anyone with enough money for an internet connection has some value to advertisers.
  - brokenparser 14y ago
    You still get advertisements, but with DNT they wouldn't be targeted to your profile.
- jfoster 14y ago
  I'm not sure, but let's assume they are. Doesn't respecting do not track reduce their value even further? I'm not arguing that ad companies shouldn't respect so not track, just considering the incentives and disincentives in front of them.
  - 3825 14y ago
    The main motivation is to have some standing ground to prevent legislation.

misterbwong 14y ago

I've seen this repeated a couple times and I'd like to know the reasoning on this argument. Is making DNT opt-out bad? Seems like MS would catch more flak had they made it opt-in, though I may just be misunderstanding the situation

B-Con 14y ago
> Is making DNT opt-out bad? The common argument is that it is: 1) Advertisers won't give up tracking across the board. It's too lucrative for them. 2) Most users don't care about the setting that much. 3) Enabling it for default for the majority of users will cause present advertisers with a majority of users who they cannot track. 4) Per (1), the advertisers will then elect to ignore DNT. 5) DNT becomes a useless ignored flag and a waste of time. Instead, if it's opt-in: 1) Most people don't bother turning it on. 2) The advertisers face pressure to comply with the ones who do. 3) People who do turn it on then enjoy the benefits. Also, the DNT specification explicitly says that DNT should not be turned on by default, for these very reasons.
- neumann_alfred 14y ago
  How is that not blackmail? You might as well say if everybody started reading the list of ingredients of food they buy and take them seriously, corporations would just start to lie and put whatever they want in there. Sure, maybe some would, but that's what jail is for.
  - Dylan16807 14y ago
    People intentionally and knowingly reading the ingredients / turning on DNT is the correct method. I'm struggling to find a valid food-ingredient-analogy but it would be very different from your scenario. It would have to involve Microsoft auto-scanning the ingredients without the user ever turning this feature on. Then Microsoft would have to do something with the results that hurts/disparages certain food producers. And then the food producers would stop listing ingredients in a form that Microsoft can OCR, not lie about them.
- 14y ago

Firehed 14y ago

I think it was a sham either way (without legislation, there's really no reason for anyone to adhere to the requests, and as users we have little to no way of knowing if our requests are being fulfilled), but MS screwed the pooch here by completely violating the intent and implementation of the spec. Sending "DNT: 1" in your request header means "please do not track me". Sending "DNT: 0" means "I don't care if you track me". Sending no DNT header (every request on a browser where the header is unsupported or a browser has not received a preference from a user) means "I have not expressed a tracking preference or do not have the ability to do so". By having a default sent either way as MS did, it violates the semantic meaning of the header, meaning that the receiving server can't distinguish between "no preference" and "don't track"/"go ahead". It's like a pair of radio buttons: selecting neither is valid, but once you've made a selection you can't get it back to an unselected state.