Do Not Track: an uncertain future
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 12th Oct 2012 23:06 UTC
Internet & Networking "With the fate of our beloved internet economy allegedly at stake, perhaps it's a good time to examine what Do Not Track is. How did the standard came to be, what does it do, and how does it stand to change online advertising? Is it as innocuous as privacy advocates make it sound, or does it stand to jeopardize the free, ad-supported internet we've all come to rely on?" Do Not Track is inherently flawed because it gives people a false sense of security. Other than perhaps well-known and accountable sites, nobody's going to abide by it anyway. We don't need nonsense like DNT - we need to educate people about that 'private browsing' button. Everybody's already using it for porn anyway; shouldn't be hard to let people know what other things it can be used for.
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Lazarus
Member since:
2005-08-10

If you don't mind my asking, how would you have thought of it if it had been presented, persistently, in terms of a checkbox labelled with "Request that all participating sites opt me out of being tracked"


I'd not have thought any differently about it. The problems are not how the "feature" is presented but in how it works.

Its like leaving your house unlocked all the time, putting a note on the front door letting any passer-by know that its unlocked and asking them to not do anything nefarious.

DNT is a foolish waste of time and resources.

Reply Parent Score: 3

Lennie Member since:
2007-09-22

DNT is a foolish waste of time and resources.


Well, that is not really true, because of this:

1. you can not prevent to being tracked, it is technically impossible.

For example you currently have user-agent-profiling.

Which looks at all the properties of the browser you are running (plugins installed, screensize, browser version, etc.).

If you would want to do it, you would need to create browsers with very few features which are all bug-for-bug-compatible (impossible anyway) and use the Tor network all the time.

2. So what you need are laws, to make it illegal to ignore DNT. Some countries already have such laws.

3. what the marketers should understand is that tracking is not required even for the very advanced advertising systems currently in the market:

https://air.mozilla.org/tracking-not-required/

There is a reason almost all browsers now have support for DNT.

Reply Parent Score: 3

WorknMan Member since:
2005-11-13

2. So what you need are laws, to make it illegal to ignore DNT. Some countries already have such laws.


Right, just like there are laws to try and prevent people from sharing copyrighted material. And we see how well that has worked out.

Reply Parent Score: 2

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