3 ms·

It was always the intention of DNT to represent the user choice. It was just not explicit that it should be OFF by default. Reviewers fault. Microsoft, made a

by dudus 12y ago

It was always the intention of DNT to represent the user choice. It was just not explicit that it should be OFF by default. Reviewers fault. Microsoft, made a Marketing stunt of enabling it by default 2 years ago, in practice killing the point of DNT and setting back the industry several years. With a default option DNT would have no reason to be honored by any site owner. We could be enjoying native DNT tracking right now if Microsoft hadn't done that stupid dick move 2 years ago. How many years we'll need before the number of users that already have DNT set to ON by default are negligent is hard to measure. This should be a post apologizing for the trouble they caused and for destroyed the point of a W3C proposal that set back the industry for several years. Instead it looks like another Marketing stunt.

jszymborski 12y ago
While I'm all for having DNT's default set to ON, how much does it really change? Is there really any impetus for companies to not track you when you send a DNT header? Is there really any governing body that enforces it in any meaningful way?
- rspeer 12y ago
  I can imagine a release of a plugin similar to Privacy Badger or Ghostery that whitelists sites that honor DNT and follow a reasonable privacy policy. I'd use it. This may seem paradoxical, in that this plugin would only work correctly by not sending DNT to those sites. But I've found that some tracking cookies are useful (the one for editing Wikimedia projects, for example), and sites should be able to earn their way onto a whitelist, as long as they honor the requests of people who say "No. Don't track me. Not even you."
outside1234 12y ago
Really? Its Microsoft's fault? I totally agree that "Don't Track" should be the default. I get the new proposal as well - but to say that they somehow set it back is BS. What is holding it back is that there are no teeth to it - no laws that you must respect it - and lots of rewards for ignoring it. That's what needs to change.
- air 12y ago
  It's politics. If the default is "don't track", advertisers have a case that the user has not explicitly asked to disable tracking.
  - BinaryIdiot 12y ago
    > advertisers have a case that the user has not explicitly asked to disable tracking. Advertisers don't need a case. They don't need to ever care about this bit.
- dudus 12y ago
  DNT is not a technology that will automatically restrict people from tracking you like adBlock for instance. The idea is that good citizens will honor your choice of not be tracked. It needs buy in from both users, advertisers and publishers. If you make it so that you only get approval from users, advertisers and publishers will ignore it and the whole thing collapses. They already have very little incentive to honor it. We could have seen laws, in the future, requiring business to honor it. But this move by Microsoft gave publishers/advertisers all the weapons they would need to fight those bills. It no longer express the choice of the users, and that was the key of DNT. Microsoft move completely removed any possibility that publishers or advertisers could support it, basically killing the proposal. It is their fault. Do not expect to see anyone honoring it anytime soon.
  - BinaryIdiot 12y ago
    > Microsoft move completely removed any possibility that publishers or advertisers could support it, basically killing the proposal. It is their fault. Do not expect to see anyone honoring it anytime soon. Most advertisers that I read about who were also vocal against DNT said they would not honor it before Microsoft even made it a default. Quit kidding yourself that Microsoft's decision did anything but hasten its irrelevance.
    - dudus 12y ago
      It certainly didn't help either
BinaryIdiot 12y ago
> With a default option DNT would have no reason to be honored by any site owner. We could be enjoying native DNT tracking right now if Microsoft hadn't done that stupid dick move 2 years ago[...]This should be a post apologizing for the trouble they caused and for destroyed the point of a W3C proposal that set back the industry for several years. Instead it looks like another Marketing stunt. You're taking this really far out into left field and what you're saying is incorrect. DNT is a useless standard; it requires the visiting site to receive the preference and act appropriately on it. There is no way to enforce that the site acts appropriately. Sites that want to track users were always going to anyway. Except for maybe a few exceptions (such as I would expect browser makers to follow the standard) almost no one was ever going to honor this even before Microsoft's decision. If you have a business where tracking users can make it more profitable and the W3C came along with a standard that said "if you receive this bit pretty please don't track the user please" why would you even care? There is nothing anyone can do about whether you track or not. At worst someone on a blog publishes a rant about how you're ignoring it but big whoop; countless other sites are also going to be ignoring it.
- sp332 12y ago
  I think evidence goes the other way. You can ask web crawlers not to index certain pages with robots.txt even if it would be better for their business if they did. And this is widely respected. Now imagine that IIS put "* deny" in the default site config; it would get a lot less respect.
  - fixermark 12y ago
    This example actually highlights an interesting difference between the two. I think one of the reasons robots.txt is generally respected is that there's a stick behind that carrot; hypothetically (what with us all using so much cloud these days), a site administrator that noticed a traffic spike commensurate with something ignoring robots.txt can respond by treating the requests as attacker-originated, which most "legitimate" sites would want to avoid. What's the stick behind the carrot for do not track?
    - 12y ago

by dudus 12y ago

jszymborski 12y ago

While I'm all for having DNT's default set to ON, how much does it really change? Is there really any impetus for companies to not track you when you send a DNT header? Is there really any governing body that enforces it in any meaningful way?

rspeer 12y ago
I can imagine a release of a plugin similar to Privacy Badger or Ghostery that whitelists sites that honor DNT and follow a reasonable privacy policy. I'd use it. This may seem paradoxical, in that this plugin would only work correctly by not sending DNT to those sites. But I've found that some tracking cookies are useful (the one for editing Wikimedia projects, for example), and sites should be able to earn their way onto a whitelist, as long as they honor the requests of people who say "No. Don't track me. Not even you."

outside1234 12y ago

Really? Its Microsoft's fault? I totally agree that "Don't Track" should be the default. I get the new proposal as well - but to say that they somehow set it back is BS. What is holding it back is that there are no teeth to it - no laws that you must respect it - and lots of rewards for ignoring it. That's what needs to change.

air 12y ago
It's politics. If the default is "don't track", advertisers have a case that the user has not explicitly asked to disable tracking.
- BinaryIdiot 12y ago
  > advertisers have a case that the user has not explicitly asked to disable tracking. Advertisers don't need a case. They don't need to ever care about this bit.
dudus 12y ago
DNT is not a technology that will automatically restrict people from tracking you like adBlock for instance. The idea is that good citizens will honor your choice of not be tracked. It needs buy in from both users, advertisers and publishers. If you make it so that you only get approval from users, advertisers and publishers will ignore it and the whole thing collapses. They already have very little incentive to honor it. We could have seen laws, in the future, requiring business to honor it. But this move by Microsoft gave publishers/advertisers all the weapons they would need to fight those bills. It no longer express the choice of the users, and that was the key of DNT. Microsoft move completely removed any possibility that publishers or advertisers could support it, basically killing the proposal. It is their fault. Do not expect to see anyone honoring it anytime soon.
- BinaryIdiot 12y ago
  > Microsoft move completely removed any possibility that publishers or advertisers could support it, basically killing the proposal. It is their fault. Do not expect to see anyone honoring it anytime soon. Most advertisers that I read about who were also vocal against DNT said they would not honor it before Microsoft even made it a default. Quit kidding yourself that Microsoft's decision did anything but hasten its irrelevance.
  - dudus 12y ago
    It certainly didn't help either

BinaryIdiot 12y ago

> With a default option DNT would have no reason to be honored by any site owner. We could be enjoying native DNT tracking right now if Microsoft hadn't done that stupid dick move 2 years ago[...]This should be a post apologizing for the trouble they caused and for destroyed the point of a W3C proposal that set back the industry for several years. Instead it looks like another Marketing stunt. You're taking this really far out into left field and what you're saying is incorrect. DNT is a useless standard; it requires the visiting site to receive the preference and act appropriately on it. There is no way to enforce that the site acts appropriately. Sites that want to track users were always going to anyway. Except for maybe a few exceptions (such as I would expect browser makers to follow the standard) almost no one was ever going to honor this even before Microsoft's decision. If you have a business where tracking users can make it more profitable and the W3C came along with a standard that said "if you receive this bit pretty please don't track the user please" why would you even care? There is nothing anyone can do about whether you track or not. At worst someone on a blog publishes a rant about how you're ignoring it but big whoop; countless other sites are also going to be ignoring it.

sp332 12y ago
I think evidence goes the other way. You can ask web crawlers not to index certain pages with robots.txt even if it would be better for their business if they did. And this is widely respected. Now imagine that IIS put "* deny" in the default site config; it would get a lot less respect.
- fixermark 12y ago
  This example actually highlights an interesting difference between the two. I think one of the reasons robots.txt is generally respected is that there's a stick behind that carrot; hypothetically (what with us all using so much cloud these days), a site administrator that noticed a traffic spike commensurate with something ignoring robots.txt can respond by treating the requests as attacker-originated, which most "legitimate" sites would want to avoid. What's the stick behind the carrot for do not track?
  - 12y ago