
"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.
Member since:
2007-11-09
The problem is that both Microsoft and Apache screwed up. Microsoft should ask users outright if they want to turn on DNT the first time IE is started on a user profile. Making the option easy to get to is a good thing. Microsoft ignored the standard.
Microsoft had three possible motives for enabling DNT by default.
1. User privacy
2. Trying to kill DNT out of the gate
3. To screw google over. Google makes money on advertising after all.
Apache shouldn't block the header outright because some users might want it on. They're screwing over the users who care about privacy. Their only choice is to switch to another browser, but apache httpd doesn't tell the user they're ignoring DNT. This will require user training. Apache ignored the standard.
Both sides are wrong.