Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla Proposes 'Do Not Track' HTTP Header
MozTrack writes "The emergence of data mining by third party advertisers has caused a national debate from privacy experts, lawmakers and browser supporters. Mozilla's Firefox, a popular browser company, has proposed a new feature that will prevent people's personal information from getting mined and sold for advertising. The feature would allow users to set a browser preference that will broadcast their desire to opt-out of third party, advertising-based tracking. It would do this via a 'Do Not Track' HTTP header with every click or page view in Firefox."
"Mozilla's Firefox, a popular browser company"
Or ignore it. I'd think it'd be fairly trivial to ignore that header, especially if there is a least one country that doesn't legally require it to be honored (and even without that, they'll probably still ignore it in countries where it is illegal).
They won't fight it, they laugh at it.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Along the same lines, this would probably make the issue worse. Based on that tag, people are going to simply assume security and privacy where there is none.
Basic idea seems the same, right? http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3514.html
Your post advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) crowd-sourced
approach to preventing users from being tracked. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which will vary from state to state and country to country)
(x) It does not provide an adequate method of enforcement
( ) Nobody will spend eight months sitting in dull planning meetings to do it
( ) No one will be able to find the guy
(x) It is defenseless against rogue websites
(x) It tries to stop a fundamentally broken cookie model
(x) Users of the web will not put up with it
( ) The government will not put up with it
(x) Advertisers will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from unwilling sources
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many advertisers cannot afford to lose what little business they have left
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
( ) Users are too stupid to know they're being tracked anyway
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(x) Browsers' unwillingness to change to suit something that will be circumvented in days
( ) The existence of programmers for hire
(x) The W3C
( ) Sources' proven unwillingness to "go direct"
( ) The difficulty of changing all those websites
( ) How few people actually care
(x) The vast majority of "programmers" are unable to even code in semantically-correct HTML
( ) Unpopularity of weird new headers
(x) Unstoppable moneyed Kung-Fu
( ) Legal liability of vigilante sites
( ) The training required to be even an craptaculous web monkey
(x) Users hate pop-ups
( ) The necessity of ignoring laws from other countries
(x) Americans' huge distrust of anyone not from their country/state/city/block
( ) Reluctance of governments and corporations to be held to account by two guys with a blog
( ) Inability of random people on the internets to demand anything
( ) How easy it is for corporations to manipulate unemployed sweaty shut-ins
( ) Rupert Murdoch
( ) Pron
( ) Hulu
(x) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) The tragedy of the commons
(x) Craigslist
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to visit Drudge, Slashdot and Democracy Now without seeing those Cash for Gold ads
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatibility with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don’t think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you’re a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Maybe you should actually visit reality every fortnight or so
Yeah, right.