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W3C Proposes Unified "Do Not Track" Privacy Standard
In his first submission, kierny writes "A W3C working group is crafting two standards, due out by summer 2012, to enable consumers to opt out of online tracking. Numerous big players are involved, including Google, Facebook, IBM, Mozilla, Microsoft, plus the Center for Democracy and Technology, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Federal Trade Commission. The first standard is Tracking Preference Expression, 'to define a standard for a how a browser can tell a website that a user wants more privacy,' says W3C working group co-chairman Dr. Matthias Schunter of IBM Research. 'So you send a signal, and you get a response from the website which tells you that the request has been honored.' The second standard, meanwhile, is the Tracking Compliance and Scope Specification, which details how websites should comply with Do Not Track preferences. But, don't expect Do Not Track to be active by default."
work as well as that 'Do Not Call' list.
...for use without a computer?
And then the enforcement is lax.
Enforcement by whom? This is just a standard by W3C, and it is a weak one at that. If you fail to produce compliant HTML, your web page might not render correctly; if you fail to follow this standard, nobody will notice.
Privacy is not something that a standard can guarantee you.
Palm trees and 8
Not tracking should be the default, and you should have to opt in to tracking.
RFC 3514 was meant as a joke. This time it looks like people are discussing it for real. Let's go ahead and add a "Captain Justice" HTTP header that would command all the bad guys to immediately stop being evil.
It's interesting to Microsoft to kill tracking, since it's what their biggest rival - Google - uses for generate revenue, and MS's income comes from their [dubious quality] OS and office suite.
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