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Microsoft Wins Congressional Backing For Do-Not-Track Default In IE10
An anonymous reader writes "Thought Do Not Track was strictly a geeks' issue? Think again. After Microsoft was slapped down for enabling DNT by default in Internet Explorer 10, the co-chairs of the US's Congressional Bi-Partisan Privacy Caucus have sent a strongly-worded letter to the W3C urging it to reconsider. As webdev360.com points out, it's an interesting (unprecedented?) example of Congress interacting with the standards body: 'Whether members of the [working group] will take kindly to the Representatives' interference remains to be seen. Ed Markey's legislative director, Joseph Wender, has brought the letter to the attention of the group's mailing list, but, as of the time of writing, he hasn't received any replies.'"
Think this ties in well with another story from a bit earlier: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/06/20/0421210/cnet-idc-find-rapid-increase-in-behavioral-data-tracking
-1 troll is not supposed to be used simply because you don't agree
why don't they make it into a law that you have to have a "TRACK ME PLEASE" cookie for it to be legal to track your flow through multiple domains..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Unless they're planning on adding the force of law to the DNT bit, all this will do is make advertisers ignore it (and, they could argue, rightfully so since they couldn't be certain that people turned it on of their own volition).
Microsoft could pop up a dialog asking, but even then, who exactly is going to click "yes, track me"? Perhaps they should get together with some people from the advertising industry to come up with some fair copy that explains the benefits (targeted ads mean that you receive ads that will more likely interest you, after all) and drawbacks of cross-domain tracking, to ensure a semi-educated choice on the part of users.
If they just turn it on and don't ask about it though, expect it to be yet another technology extinguished by poor Microsoft engineering decisions. (I was kinda hoping we were past that, guys.)
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
They're opposed to it, because it is perceived that if "Do Not Track" is the default, advertising companies would simply ignore the setting and track people anyway.
While playing closed-minded open-source Microsoft-bashing zealot on Slashdot is, in the eyes of many here, a route to being cool -- if you want to know, you could always use Google, Bing, or just run Fiddler and look for yourself.
The protocol is fully documented by Microsoft and not hard to find if you have some keyword ninja skills and a search engine.
If it's the default, there will be virtually noone who turns it off...
Those who care about privacy will leave it on, those who don't care won't even realise the option exists.
Subsequently, advertisers will ignore it because it becomes fairly meaningless, and not ignoring it would lose them potential eyeballs who don't care about being tracked. So the feature just becomes worthless.
On the other hand, if its off by default then only those who care about privacy will turn it on. Advertisers are quite happy to lose these eyeballs, as these people would generally not respond to advertising anyway. Everyone wins.
The whole purpose of the DNT header is to allow users to make a statement of "I do not want to be tracked", but if you make it the default it will just be a statement of "I have probably not bothered to change the default settings and most likely don't even realise such settings exist"
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