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Mozilla Issues Do-Not-Track Guide For Advertisers
angry tapir writes "Mozilla has issued a do not track field guide to encourage advertisers and publishers to implement do-not-track (DNT) functionality. The guide contains tutorials, case studies and sample code to illustrate how companies use the DNT technology. Mozilla aims to inspire developers, publishers and advertisers to adopt DNT and wants to put the control over Internet tracking into the hands of users. The browser maker wants to put a stop to behavioral targeting and pervasive tracking on the Web. The guide can be found here (PDF)."
Rather than such a complex system, why not have the people who want to be tracked volunteer?
They could download a browser app that transmits their browsing history to advertisers.
If there is no one who wants to be tracked, then the problem solves itself.
It's naive to think that this will have any impact. Toothless ideals like this never work in the real world. They just give a false sense of security. In fact, it's much like the recent and ongoing debacle with CAs and SSL certificates. They're great theoretical concepts that both totally fall apart when subjected to the dynamics of business and the real world.
I think it's nice Mozilla is doing the right thing and leading by example. Now that they have explained HOW to do this, we'll know that everyone not doing it simply decided not to.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Here is Mozilla's page on it. It appears that it just sends a "don't track me, pls" HTTP header if you enable it.
If only a handful of people use it, I can imagine that larger and more-responsible advertisers might interpret that as an opt-out. I can't imagine them agreeing if it gets more pervasive, though. Many currently have opt-out methods, but they're deliberately a bit harder to use and less automatic. I would imagine that at the least, they'll try to set up some requirement for additional confirmation of the opt-out.
And of course many advertisers will just ignore it: voluntary implementation of opt-out functionality will never catch the worst offenders.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I would suspect that many advertisers will ignore the document because their cash cow is advertising. They want to be invasive. They want me the average consumer to see what they have to offer. What incentive is there for them to lose potential advertising revenue?
On a personal level I feel advertising agencies have been allow too many liberties and have invaded the lives of consumers way too much. I can't stand them. I'd like to see advertisements go away. But they won't, and even telling them "Don't Want" is not going to work. Look how well that worked for the Do Not Call registry. I still receive calls and every time I say...."I'm on the do not call list...." I don't even get the courtesy from them to remove my number they hang up faster than I can request to be removed from their list. This gives them the lame excuse "the customer did not ask to be removed....". They ignore the Do Not Call list.
Based on the above scenario, what makes me believe that an Ad company would follow the Do Not Track requests?
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
Right. You're asking marketers to give up what is essentially gold to them?
This is going to be about as successful as setting a flag on en e-mail address and expecting spammers to not spam it.
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
I think it's problematic that Firefox users are given a vague illusion that they can actually prevent being tracked by setting an option in their browser settings. I know that "tell sites not to track me" is not the same as "prevent sites from tracking me", but does your parents?
Won't someone think of the parents!
What I think a lot of people are missing is that these are the necessary first steps in the process of stopping tracking:
1. Provide technical infrastructure for users to express their prefs.
2. Provide advertisers the tools to see those prefs, how to handle them, etc.
3. A few ethical advertisers implement those tools and demonstrate that it's feasible.
4. Make it illegal to ignore the prefs.
5. FTC comes down like a ton of bricks on anybody who tracks people who opted out.
Wow, a voluntary do not track program -- that'll catch on. The only reason the Do Not Call List worked out ok was because there were penalties for not using it and even then there was abuse and numerous work arounds and loopholes.
From the writers of the 'do not bite guide' for dogs?
Sure its voluntary, but its a first step. Now there is no real excuse for tracking people except wanting to.
TFA says that there are more users who turned on 'do not track' than are using adblock, which means there are lots of people who don't want to be tracked. What the next step will be depends, since we now know that tracking them isn't an 'accident because I was unable to'.
Maybe an addon will create a blacklist so you know what to avoid, maybe some country will make it illegal to track people who don't want to be tracked (Probably not in the US, but I'm sure the EU might). Everything is in place now.
I have a good name for this addition to the http header. Let's call it the "Pretty please addition" , or the "Puwwleeeeeeeeeeeeeese extension".
Advertisers have been shown to not obey something as basic as a user's request to delete cookies. What makes you think any advertiser in the world is going to obey this without legislation followed by enforcement?
Install 2 add-ons. No Script and Ad Block Plus. No Script really opened my eyes to how much crap is tied to some web pages and also how google and facebook know every move I make.
Honestly everyone knows that advertisers won't listen to these requests, but it does lay a framework for law to require corporations to listen to these request. Before this was in place a corporation could simply say, "I didn't know he wanted to be tracked"
How's that "do not spam" thing working out, by the way?
This just gives the dumber people a sense that they CAN avoid tracking just by setting some browser option that sends a "please?" header.
The ONLY way to prevent tracking is through technical measures: not loading ads, not running javascript, and to be more extreme, browsing through an anonymizing proxy. Anyone not doing those things WILL be tracked, and some stupid header isn't going to change that simple fact.
Amusing captcha: "Bridge".
Mothers Against Drunk Driving issues a Do-Not-Drink guide TO THE ENTIRE WORLD.
a guide on how foxes should properly care for henhouses.
... I need to pick up a "please do not rob me" sign on my way home today.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Apparently Mozilla has also issued a "Do Not Print" guide for Firefox. I had to use Chrome to print some web pages recently. Firefox=blank, Chrome=get everything. ???
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
What's wrong with issuing a browser that doesn't track in the first place? Then users could "Opt In" by downloading the pink version instead of the friendly orange version?
"Guidelines" are CYA, not serious concern about user privacy.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
I got this one!
Let's make a Premium list of everyone who sends "Don't Track Me Please" headers! They are advanced users ages 21-59!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Not to mention, the US government has little incentive to curb tracking. They'll give waivers to ISPs and Google, etc. for "protect the children" and "stop terrorism" reasons. They're already trying to force them to KEEP that data for longer and make it easier for law enforcement to get.
The company I work for does marketing of sorts. We try to pretend we don't, but thats really what it is.
We do track users, but not in any way that is passed along to our customers as personally identifiable. We track aggregates like 'X number of people say it, Y number of people clicked on it, Z number of people bought it'. I'm probably the only person currently that could even type sale Z to event X within our system, their is no internal code to do so. Even then, the only way I could tie it back to an individual (rather than an IP address) is if they ALSO happened to be one of our customers. This is intentional. If I don't write it or log it, it can't be abused until someone does.
My first thought to this however is ...
Hahahaha go fuck yourself, no way I'm implementing that. None of my competition will, why the fuck would I? If they don't want me to track them, dont' randomly load shit from my website, and accept/send me cookies and other personally identifiable information. We've already cut ourselves off from tracking information because, well its just wrong. I'm not writing more code ... to deal with a flag that says 'ignore this information I'm sending you!' ... rather than just NOT FUCKING SENDING ME THE INFORMATION IN THE FIRST GOD DAMN PLACE.
Sorry Mozilla, you can kindly go fuck yourselves, this is yet another example of how completely disconnected from reality you are. You want me to not track you? Fix your fucking browser so it doesn't default to making itself trackable as all hell. Your browser is leaking information, not my problem. (Its common to all browsers mind you, but still not my problem)
Information IS money, always has been, the web didn't create this situation, and never has someone saying 'hey, don't track me!' stopped anyone from remembering such information. Computers have just made it far easier to correlate.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
The browser maker wants to put a stop to behavioral targeting and pervasive tracking on the Web.
I want to be a fairy princess, and to live in a castle on the moon!
Does Mozilla have any idea how much money this stuff is worth? Let me put it into perspective: I did a two month test run of some hard-core personalization code on a tiny little backwater advertising system. It ran on one tiny little out-of-the-way placement of that tiny little backwater advertising system. The projected annual change in profit for that one little placement on that one little system? Six point five million dollars per year.
I'd put the annual take at a company like Google or Facebook in the billions, easily. That is why Facebook's initial reaction to Heise's two-click-like from a week or two ago was "YOU CAN'T DO THAT WE'RE SHUTTING YOU DOWN IT'S A VIOLATION OF OUR ToS AHHHHH NOOOO NOOO NNOOOOO NOOOO NOOOOOOOO!!!!"
There are three ways behavioral targeting could be put back in the bottle:
1. It becomes uncommon for companies to have a CEO who behaves as though he has an antisocial personality disorder.
2. Onion routing (like Tor) with advanced request sanitizing becomes the standard way to browse the web.
3. A law or other coercive force threatens greater risk*cost for tracking than the profit from behavioral analysis.
As a bonus, here's a dose of reality: Neither option 1 nor option 2 will happen. Here's one more: The U.S. government is getting paid an awful lot of money -- both legitimately, through taxes, and legally-but-illegitimately, through campaign contributions -- to not write and enforce a law to stop it.
So, unless you want to go join Anonymous or the nutjobs calling for revolution; get used to it. This is your role in society now.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Whats weird is I installed the adwords & google analytics optout addons for chrome. It messes up the rendering on certain pages (e.g. acid3 test)
http://acid3.acidtests.org/
This is what I get : http://i.imgur.com/HvY5U.png