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Microsoft Reaffirms Default Do-Not-Track For IE10, Windows 8 Express Setup
Billly Gates writes "Microsoft has confirmed that Internet Explorer 10 will have Do-Not-Track settings enabled by default. IE 10 comes with Windows 8, and will go release candidate for Windows 7 very soon, according to Anne Kohn in a comment in IE's blog. During Windows 8 setup, users who choose the 'Express' option will have DNT on by default, while using the 'Custom' option will give them the chance to change the setting, if they want. IE 10 already has a score of 319 in html5test.com, while MS is trying to position IE as a great browser again. Will this pressure other browsers such as Firefox and Opera to do the same?"
When Microsoft began talking about this in May, it touched off quite a debate at W3C about whether browsers should have DNT turned on by default or not.
And you don't know Google search either. What kind of web sites do you build?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Better than that, the IE10 score is lower than just about every current browser on the market, except IE9. :-)
DNT only works if websites honor it. Some have already said that if browsers turned it on by default, they would not honor it. So... could MS, a company with a long history of embrace and strange while raping it up the ass, be enabling it by default to give websites an excuse to ignore it and thereby kill it from within while appearing to the gullible as a nice company?
Well, Soulskill sure is gullible enough. a great browser again. Indeed.
It ain't Paranoia if you think MS is out to screw everyone else. In fact, that is hopelessly naive. MS happily screws itself too.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
HTTP header to request "opt out" of any tracking on websites you visit.
i.e. will be ignored by just about everyone by default anyway, and even when you "opt out" you can still be tracked by most websites in the world, and turning it on or off will have virtually zero visible effect to the user so you'll never know even if the website "accidentally" tracked you anyway.
Worthless, ill-designed, junk.
I wonder what websites will do once almost everyone has Do Not Track enabled. If it's just a few nerds... let's stop tracking them if they insist. If it's everyone...?
"And when everyone is Super... no one will be!" ---The Incredibles
But in this case, it's horribly wrong.
This will effectively KILL the do-not-track project.
Wow! A score of 319 is really impressive!
Wait hang on.
* Chrome 22: 442
* Chrome 21: 437
* Opera 12.50: 409
* Firefox 14: 345
Sure its better than IE 9, but a modern browser it is not.
Doesn't even come close to stable Firefox.
Yeah, I don't know what people are smoking these days, but you've got to be seriously delusional if you think that Do Not Track is going to be respected in any way. They'll track anyway, and if they get busted, they'll call out the lawyer brigades and nothing will fucking happen. Hell, maybe they'll even end up with some sweet legal precedent saying they have every right to track us if we deign to navigate to one of their websites.
I trust NoScript and Adblock, I sure as shit do not trust "we won't track you, we promise!"
Sod that. It doesn't even come close to Opera Mobile!
IE 10 already has a score of 319 in html5test.com, while MS is trying to position IE as a great browser again.
Again!? Implying it was great once? What have I missed? I've been in web development for around 12 years now, and I most certainly do not remember ever having many nice things to say about IE. Or do you mean great, as in having the majority monopoly-based userbase?
10 years ago how well did Netscape 4.7 do CSS compared to IE 6? ... thats what I thought.
Soulskill edited my entry as I put a whim of sarcasm stating slashdotters and webmasters favorite browser (sarcasm intended). Needless to say I remember IE 6 frustratingly and angrily beating Netscape quite well as it was the first browser to support the proper box model as long as it didn't go into quirks mode. I wanted Netscape to win but 10 years ago went to IE 6 and it was a better browser. IE 5 was not bad either and invented AJAX. IE 6 is just well very old and not meant for anything but simple 50k websites with 2 or 3 tiny 25k pics with a css that is about half dozen lines or less usually specifying fonts or something silly. Not the bloated sites we have today. The things it does wrong are were very cutting edge and not standardized in 2001. It is similiar to alot of css 3 stuff I see with different arguments for color picking a gradient for example. W3c will pick one syntax in 10 years times and one of the browsers today wont be standards complaint with it in the future. IE 6 shouldn't have been used for so long.
MS let it rot and did not fix the rendering bugs nor the huge security risks as MS thought we would all be using Vista and IE 7 by 2005 (2004 was Longhorns original date if I remember correctly) and the delaying made things worse.
Anyway give MS credit for at least trying to make a somewhat decent browser and making your life as a web developer easier. IE 10 is supposed to be truly competitive to Firefox and Chrome which is good for METRO developers. Remember people like your Mom, grandparents, Chinese, and corporate employers wont ever switch no matter how much we beg. At least let them enjoy a somewhat similar browsing experience you have at home. I saw a benchmark testing emca javascript and IE 10 was the most compliant browser out there. It will make everyone's life easier if people use 1 standard for the internet and IE is catching up finally.
http://saveie6.com/
If all the browser support of Javascript, css and html5 was close to the same.
I know... I know...
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Don't you think it was DOA anyways? The system depended upon honest advertisers, which is an oxymoron if I ever heard one.
Mod parent up please.
Even the folks who have gotten behind DNT and pushed are against this.
The only reason I can think that MS would do this is either for appearance or because they know it would destroy the effort, or both.
I'm a professional web developer of 16 years+, and I don't know what "Do Not Track" is.
No need to embarrass yourself in front of the class dude.
My understanding is just IE 10 users won't be able to DNT; as the browsers should make explicitly an opt in choice (ideally hidden somewhere). Now to opt into it they would have to change there user-agent or something else far harder than it should be.
If win8 adoption is slow then everything will be fine for everyone else.
I doubt if Firefox is going to do this anytime soon.
This is the reason Google made Chrome and also support Firefox monetarily.
Prefork is pretty much used in any areas where Apache is used in high demand services. You can get fairly decent performance out of Apache in this mode provided you have adjusted the system's file descriptors according to the child processes and traffic the webserver is meant to handle.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Look who decided to enter the browser wars again.
Still the lowest of the main browsers, and just a few over some handhelds browsers, so not that bad at all.
Oh god the consoles page saddens.
Even televisions have higher stats than they do, what the hell man, what the actual hell? That is embarrassing. (I don't think PSP can even run that page at all, probably get a out of memory or not allow the changing of any elements/styles)
Hell, PHONES have better browsers. They have no excuse when they are around the same prices.
Why the hell do they even bother going with Netfront if they don't even bother going all the way?
No wonder they are dying.
My Android phone has like 147. It is quite modern thank you very much.
First off, (I am not an IE lover here or a troll as I am just correcting the anti IE noise) html5test.com tests obscure things the website makers would like to see discussed on some mailings list. It is not w3c at all nor is all of recommended in anyway!
To say it is inferior to a handheld device like my galaxy s or someone said does not qualify as even modern is lubricious. Both Chrome and Firefox last summer has lower scores! Basically 10 months behind does not make it ancient on a standard people discuss in their mailing lists.
That 327 score includes gradients, transformations, webworkers, h.264, and other things. It does not include some api's for indexing and webcam. I believe they could be used for hacking purposes and until a secure implementation is proposed probably is best it doesn't include it.
http://saveie6.com/
10 years ago how well did Netscape 4.7 do CSS compared to IE 6?
10 years ago Netscape 4.7 had been abandoned several years: Netscape 6, on the other hand wiped the floor with IE 6 on CSS, although admittedly, it sucked in numerous other ways.
Worthless, ill-designed, junk.
Nooooo!?! Next thing you are going to tell me is that the hackers disregard RFC3514 during attacks???
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
This will effectively KILL the do-not-track project.
Good. The do-not-track project as designed by Mozilla and Google is worthless, and I'm reasonably sure it's intentionally broken. It's just trusting the web site to agree to your browser's plea to please not track it; there is no enforcement mechanism, and no way to even know your request is honored or not. A proper design would not even connect to a tracker's web site.
Of course, Google has a major conflict of interest in this - tracking people is what makes them the big money; that's why I suspect Mozilla and Google came up with this "design", pretending to care about privacy while aware that many users aren't knowledgeable or caring enough to set the DNT flag, and also on the fact that when push comes to shove they can just ignore the "don't track" request. Microsoft is pretty much calling their bluff there.
Apparently, even Konqueror - which hasn't really been under active development for years and had very little funding before then - manages to score 321.
Truth be told, I do actually concur with most of what you said above. Back in the day IE wasn't all bad, and its differences didn't really bother me since 90% of people were using it anyway and no-one really knew where standards were heading. We were all rooting for Netscape, but I used IE for development and Opera for personal browsing.
My biggest gripe with IE was IE6 way overstaying its welcome, not honoring the box model, not properly reporting errors ("Error on line 0.") and completely breaking on stupid things like leaving a trailing comma after an array (which was supposed to be legal according to Ecmascript standards, and it would have helped if it at least just properly reported the line of the error).
So yes, at one stage it was arguably on par with browsers of the same release timeframe, at least as far as its users were concerned, and completely dominant in the realm of user adoption. Great? Considering IE6 was the last version for which both those statements held true, I still wouldn't use such a strong word. But it's probably just 10 years of directed hatred getting the better of me :)
But in this case, it's horribly wrong.
This will effectively KILL the do-not-track project.
I don't understand this argument (I know it after much discussion was the compromise in the standard, but it is not a good one). Do not stalk me unless I allow you to should be the default expected behavior. That the built-in popup-blocker block popup ads by default doesn't give the website any right to claim that I didn't really actively choose to block popup ads so they are free to circumvent it.
It seems some people were hoping advertisers would respect their settings to opt-out, as long as not too many people knew about it and did it (because a significant number of users opting out would surely also "KILL the do-not-track project", stopping advertisers from respecting the setting, if they ever will). I just think this is a strange and unsustainable approach. Hopefully this will provoke a better approach.
You are missing the point of the header. It is something that is sent along with the initial HTTP request that expresses the user's desire. By itself, that's all it does. It can, however, be used in later legal proceedings. In the EU, for example, tracking someone after receiving an explicit opt-out is illegal. If someone can prove that you are tracking people who do not wish to be tracked then you are liable for large fines.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
A more cynical person might believe this is just a way for Microsoft to stick it to Google, Facebook etc, especially in tablet land. I'm sure the terms and conditions mean MS / Bing services are not so impeded by what it may or may not do with user data.
This website is incompatible with the Do Not Track feature of your browser. Please disable the feature and hit refresh to try again.
I've been in web development for around 12 years now, and I most certainly do not remember ever having many nice things to say about IE
As the other poster said, you missed most of the development of the web. Between about 1996 and 2000, there were massive regular releases of browsers and people actually cared about upgrading because they got new features. There were also a lot of sites with 'Designed for IE' or 'Designed for Netscape' on them, so you typically had both installed so you could switch between them. Opera was either ad-supported or expensive, so the two free browsers were IE and Netscape. IE 3 was reasonable, but not especially exciting. Both IE4 and NS4 were massively hyped. I remember them both arriving on cover disks (too big to download on a modem) and trying them both. Netscape 4 was slow. IE4 came with the whole Active Desktop thing (which was slow), but was pretty reasonable. Oh, and didn't crash nearly as often as Netscape 4. IE 5 fixed most of the irritations with IE4, but Netscape was on their whole 'let's rewrite the whole thing from scratch' kick so didn't put out anything to compete with it. IE 6, again, was better.
I had to use Netscape 4.x on Linux machines in university, but at home I used IE for pretty much everything. By that point, Microsoft had pretty much all of the browser market and stopped caring. Mozilla (the open sourced Netscape) pushed out a release, but it was horrible and bloated. Oh, and buggy. And, because the mail and news client ran in the same XUL / XPCOM instance as the browser, when the browser crashed (as it did every few hours), it also killed the mail client and you lost any drafts you hadn't saved.
For a while, I used Mozilla for mail and IE for browsing (IE didn't crash very often, and when it did it didn't crash mail too). Then I bought Opera, and just used Mozilla for mail. Opera was definitely nicer than IE, but it was also quite expensive. I'm not sure if they still do, but back then they also sold it for FreeBSD and NetBSD on a couple of architectures.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
This will effectively KILL the do-not-track project.
Why?
No sig today...
Could users possibly sue websites if they find the website has not honored their DNT settings?
And the question of DNT being an explicit opt-out at all, or even getting to the remote server intact, is dubious.
If you pop up a message on the front page of a website that says "can we track you for the next week?" and the user says yes, but their browser is still pushing DNT, do you think the website should not track anything anyway? They have EXPLICIT permission to do so. And on a visible, obvious, user-controlled way, that the user COULD NOT IGNORE or forget, that can be easily seen by any idiot, rather than some obscure browser setting in only some browsers, that makes no visible change to the average user, and that may not ever be able to be tweaked by the user.
It's worthless, in law and in usage. And it doesn't express the user's desire if it is on by default and the user has to specifically turn it off. It just expresses the software manufacturer's desire (and, if as the article states, installs of Windows will have it on by default, it means even less in terms of what the user wants).
I'm not stupid, I doubt there are people who WANT to be tracked or wouldn't turn it on if they understand what it was supposed to do. But it doesn't. And never will. And saying that a hidden HTTP header that could easily be stripped by intervening proxy servers that don't understand it (and be untraceable as to WHERE that header got stripped off, and thus useless in court) overrides the explicit, visible, non-accidental obtained consent of users with an associated privacy policy available to them is just ludicrous.
There will NEVER be a court case about DNT usage on a website. Because it's not binding in *any* country at all and it certainly can't be taken as a revocation of previous consent (thus it is overrode by anything that the websites ALREADY have deployed to comply with EU cookie laws, for example) without a suitable legal precedent, which itself is somewhere incredibly unlikely and impossible.
Is DNT an opt-out for THIS session? This page? This browser? This IP? This logged-in-user? Forever? Does it override previous decisions? Does its absence override its prior presence (i.e. now you surf without DNT, we can take that as consent for all the previous sessions too?). It's so vague as to be absolutely pointless.
It *does not* do what it was designed for, helps no-one (not even advertisers or users), and is a ginormous waste of money to deploy for everyone involved (from browsers to users to websites to policy makers to the government to legal cases, etc.).
The argument is that most users don't really mind being tracked, but certainly aren't going to go out of their way to enable it. The majority just doesn't care enough to actively turn DNT on, even if it's easy to find in the settings.
That's very different from pop-ups, which are immediately obnoxious and swear-inducing.
From my own experience, I suspect this is in fact true. Regular people just aren't up in arms about tracking, even though everybody knows it happens.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
I actually see it more as a "fuck you" to Google. Do not track screws with anyone who's revenue comes from tracking people & their online interactions.
But in this case, it's horribly wrong.
This will effectively KILL the do-not-track project.
Perhaps. But that reveals the underlying flaw in the do no track (DNT) idea (even if companies want to honor it): It doesn't work if everyone opts not to be tracked. There's just too much perceived value from tracking users. When it's less than 1% of the total users asking not to be tracked, marketers don't really lose anything by honoring the system. But setting IE 10 to use DNT by default means 95+% of IE 10 users will be using DNT. That's a huge market share gone,
And maybe more importantly, DNT becomes no longer opt-in. It's now an opt out system for nearly half of the users. That adds a pretty powerful argument to ignore the opt out request: nearly all of the users didn't really choose to opt-out of tracking, they just selected the default setting. So tracking them doesn't really violate their wishes. Out of 20 people who say "don't track me", maybe one actually means it. If you're a web company, even with the best of intentions, it's hard to give up tracking 20 people just to honor the wishes of one.
(This post brought to you by a six pack of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.)
If I race an olympic athlete, my result will suck.
If I race a dead person, my result will STILL suck even if I win.
You can be better then your competition AND still be crap. In the land of the blind, one-eye is king, but not automatically a great king.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
...please do not leave the ship. The water entering the hull is a feature and nothing to worry about.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
So we no more play the ACID test game?
Yeah, I don't know what people are smoking these days, but you've got to be seriously delusional if you think that Do Not Track is going to be respected in any way.
They could pass a law.
That would mean the major advertisers would have to respect it, although all advertisers are sleazy by nature so they'll try to get around it by becoming even more sleazy than they already are.
No sig today...
NoScript and Adblock alone won't stop people tracking you. You need to control cookies as well, and I'm not sure even that is enough. This plugin at least gives you a clue if you are being monitored
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
They're behind the curve for sure, but it *is* a significant step forward.
IE9 scores 138. Firefox 14 scores 345. IE10 scores 319.
Yes, it's still the worst of the major browsers, but the distance is smaller, scoring 92% of firefox is a LOT better than 40% which is the current status.
while MS is trying to position IE as a great browser again.
I can't remember anyone ever saying IE was great.
It's not enough to convert me to IE but of course it should be on by default. The only reason companies don't want that is because they know it'll never get switched on by most people.
Looking at Microsoft's business model, on the one hand you have companies like Google, Facebook (and many iOS apps) which raise money through advertising (advertising is a source of income) and Microsoft and companies like RIM which raise money through licensing fees and direct sales (advertising is a cost center). I am sure that Microsoft would like an Internet in which everything has to be paid for by the end user. And so, possibly, would Apple. Together, they outweigh the opposition.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Maybe, but are you really going to try and sue a Bermudan company for tracking you (or wherever they'll put the servers if this ever becomes legally enforceable...)
Only one thing is certain about DNT: It won't stop anybody from tracking you.
What we really need is a browser which detects tracking and randomizes results. Make it pointless to even try tracking you.
No sig today...
I think the architects are hoping that only 1% of users will enable it, and those 1% aren't really valuable to advertisers anyway (it might even be more valuable to know who they are than to track them).
If it's on by default then yeah, it'll die. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
No sig today...
Boy should you be glad you posted that comment as AC. Anyway, http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/dnt/
What is Do Not Track?
Do Not Track is a step toward putting you in control of the way your information is collected and used online. Do Not Track is a feature in Firefox that allows you to let a website know you would like to opt-out of third-party tracking for purposes including behavioral advertising. It does this by transmitting a Do Not Track HTTP header every time your data is requested from the Web.
Exactly. My initial reaction was against this, but self regulation never works. Do Not Track is simply an effort by the data aggregators to stave off real privacy regulation - "Look! We'll make a token gesture to respect the privacy of the tech savvy minority as long as we can run roughshod over the vast majority. See, we're honest folks."
Kudos to Microsoft for calling it like it is on this one.
So every script that handles DNT will start with something like "if browser=="IE10" and dnt=="1" then dnt=null", treating IE users the same as any other user that did not set the DNT flag explicitly. No harm done, except to people who are savvy enougth to know about DNT and still use IE (and they really have nobody to blame except themselves).
Now, while we're on the subject, could browser makers please make the "Accept-Language" also default to null unless the user sets it explicitly? If I set it to "en-us", it means I actually want the English version of the page, but websites that check this header all assume that "en-us" means "left at default setting" and serve me the local language of the country I happen to be in. (The same thing as will happen with DNT on IE.)
The argument is that most users don't really mind being tracked
I like how you equate being tracked to donating organs (same mechanism). Must be USian thing.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Again!? Implying it was great once?
IE3 was pretty good and I liked IE4 as well. At least it was a whole lot better than the big mess Netscape presented with Navigator 4.
Nothing but misery after that though.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
http://www.iegallery.com/en-US/trackingprotectionlists
Why doesn't anyone use these?
MS has given the ability to filter this stuff out already. Nobody looks though.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Is that like a mobile speed camera detection system?
if a site choose to ignore the DNT setting of IE10:
How can the site reliably determine whether the user behind the browser has actually explicitly taken the decision? If an online ad agency decides to ignore the DNT preferences of *all* IE10 users, they will invariably violate the right to not be tracked of a *number* of users.
This could easily land the advertiser in a serious conflict with the EU commision, and if found guilty of ignoring users' wishes they could end up with a *hefty* penalty - and face accumulating penalties until they change their behavior to respect the users.
In the US i guess that it could open up the advertiser to a class-action lawsuit - potentially even bigger then the EU fine.
No, some site on the Bahamas will probably give a damn. But Google - being the company that tracks most users and serves up ads - has *a lot* to loose on this.
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
The countries involved will legislate if the the advertisers decline to follow the voluntary code. This is the worst of end games for the advertisers because the legislation will likely be more draconian and far-reaching than the DNT code of conduct ever was. It's win-win for Microsoft.
If medicine were ever perfected, we'd all be the same.
This is great news for the 53 people who will be using IE 10 and Windows 8. Just like Vista I don't see a compelling reason to "upgrade". Unlike Vista, however, I see many, many reasons NOT to switch to Windows 8. The fact that Microsoft are tying this OS to their tablet-like thing pretty much dooms it to failure too. Hey it's my opinion, and I could be wrong. I admire that Microsoft is taking a pretty huge gamble. But I think it's a gamble they are going to lose. Surely Redmond could have come up with a better strategy but I guess Microsoft sufferes from the same illness that affects all corporations after a while when they get big enough: mediocrity.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Actually I'm Canadian, but in any case I don't see your point. How did I equate DNT to donating organs? And is this a good thing or a bad thing?
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
Basically 10 months behind does not make it ancient
Its an unreleased product, with a lead time of 18 months till the next one, it is massively behind on features available in released browsers now.
It is also dependent on the EULA not including something along the lines of "by using this site you give express permission to be tracked..."
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
If the ad companies ignore Internet Explorer's DNT, then Microsoft should respond by adding an adblocker that blocks them.
This is actually a good business strategy for them :
1.It benefits consumers because they get an integrated adblocker and it establishes customer goodwill and a reason to upgrade IE.
2.It would seriously hurt Google. Microsoft's revenue from online advertising is peanuts; their profit is in their software. By contrast, Google's only real source of income is online advertising.
Thank you for looking after the consumer.
Do-not-track should be enabled by default. The problem is not that "it will be rendered worthless", the problem is that it IS worthless, currently. Do-not-spam-me-with-unwanted-telemarketers should be the default too. The reason the Do-Not-Call lists work is that there is legislative teeth behind them, not that it is opt-in. Do-not-track is a lame attempt at self-regulating to avoid regulation, a veneer of respecting privacy in an industry where the most profit is to be found by finding the most inventive ways of violating said privacy. Couple do-not-track with real economic penalties, and opt-in or opt-out, it will work.
I am more than happy to pay for services that I use and enjoy. I don't choose to pay for them in the form of digital stalkerati.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
They'll track anyway, and if they get busted, they'll call out the lawyer brigades and nothing will fucking happen.
More like:
They'll track anyway, and if they get busted, they'll say "Oh, that was an accident, we didn't do that on purpose, really". A couple people will sue, they'll throw a couple million to shut them up, while they count the tens/hundreds of millions of ad money they got for 'targetted ads'. Then they'll stop for a bit. Then they'll track anyway, ... and if they......
See Google, see Facebook - over and over again.
And, in the meantime, give trackers that don't support DNT on the backend (like Microsoft) an temporary advantage over those that do (like Google.)
The system depended on the advertising industry thinking that adhering to the voluntary system was at least as good of a deal as what they'd get under a regulatory regime, since the whole purpose of the voluntary system was to stave off threats of regulation.
Its unlikely that the industry would see a an opt-in requirement imposed in a regulatory regime, though an opt-out requirement would be quite likely. It therefore makes no sense for the industry to prefer an opt-in voluntary scheme, though an opt-out voluntary scheme is certainly worthwhile.
That's obviously the reason. The key point to keep in mind is that while Microsoft is going overboard with DNT-by-default, they also don't support DNT at all on their own sites, whereas Google does support DNT on their sites (and does so because DNT is supposed to be used as off-by-default, as an opt-out mechanism for tracking.)
IE going DNT-by-default means Google will either have to:
1. Abandon existing DNT support on their sites (leading to, at best, adverse PR, and possibly complaints of bypassing privacy controls in browsers that support DNT),
2. Use browser-sniffing to detect IE10 and ignore DNT from that browser (leading to similar consequences to the above, with perhaps a better PR defense, but possibly worse position with regard to regulatory complaints since they will be specifically targetting a particular competitors browser),
3. Be in a disadvantageous competitive position with firms (like Microsoft) that do tracking but do not respect DNT at all
This is rather directly aimed at Google.
To use Metro apps, you need a Microsoft signon.
BS. You do not need to be logged in with a MS account to run Metro style apps.
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
No. Microsoft gets revenue that way, but DNT by default doesn't screw with them because -- unlike Google -- they don't actually support DNT at all on the backend.
Which is a big factor in why they are overly enthusiastic in supporting it in their browser. It screws with their competitors that actually respect DNT preferences based on the DNT design, which is opt-out-of-tracking, not opt-in.
With DNT by default in IE, Microsoft gains a major competitive advantage over Google in advertising.
MS also makes money by advertisement, though they've been less successful at it than Google. Of course, since unlike Google they don't respect DNT on the backend, their competitive position in advertising with respect to Google's would change if one of the major browsers went DNT by default so that Google wouldn't track its users, while MS would continue to.
As it happens, MS also happens to be a major browser vendor, and, surprise surprise, their browser is going DNT-by-default.
The corporation only has to tell the FBI you have caused them more than a certain number of dollars of loss, and they will come round and annoy you. Corporations simply pay the State to invade your privacy by force.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
This will effectively KILL the do-not-track project.
Good. The do-not-track project as designed by Mozilla and Google is worthless, and I'm reasonably sure it's intentionally broken. It's just trusting the web site to agree to your browser's plea to please not track it; there is no enforcement mechanism, and no way to even know your request is honored or not. A proper design would not even connect to a tracker's web site.
Of course, Google has a major conflict of interest in this - tracking people is what makes them the big money; that's why I suspect Mozilla and Google came up with this "design", pretending to care about privacy while aware that many users aren't knowledgeable or caring enough to set the DNT flag, and also on the fact that when push comes to shove they can just ignore the "don't track" request. Microsoft is pretty much calling their bluff there.
Any entity operating within the EU will face heavy fines for not respecting DNT.
There is no way to "not even connect to a tracker's web site" because websites who would ignore DNT would be the same websites who don't provide / lie about their privacy policy.
Short of disconnecting from the internet, DNT + fines out the ass for anyone caught ignoring it is the only workable solution.
Why can't these browsers themselves stop the tracking? I am sure the most elementary browsers are able to do this
Because the browser doesn't control the server you're connecting to.
Tracking isn't limited to cookies.
I know this probably kills it for our product that tracks users. At the moment it honors Do-Not-Track and it is easy for me to justify it to my boss: the negative effects are negligible since only small minority will turn it on and those people that do so will probably not be happy about targeted advertising anyway. But if it is default in major a browser then forget about it.
This won't kill DNT! It was a waste of time before and it will continue to serve that function well into the foreseeable future.
It's like a "Do Not Rob Me" sign on your house. The people who honour the sign aren't the one's you were worried about in the first place.
This is such bullshit. But you kinda have to argue so I can refute you.
If anything, DNT is killed by it being dependant on what websites say they would or would not honor.
It would also be effectively killed if it was OFF by default, since most people will have it off, so even if websites don't track a bunch of nerds, that doesn't mean shit in the big picture.
Let's recap: The rapist is proposing he won't rape, if 98% of people will "consent" to sex. And then someone says "let's not consent by default", so the rapist says "then I won't cooperate". And you FUCKING blame the person who made the sensible suggestion?
Positive moderation doesn't mean it's not stupid. It just means the moderators are stupid, too, the end.
I said this in June, but it still stands (unless the draft standard has been updated, but I couldn't find anything). The latest draft of the standard states "[a]n ordinary user agent MUST NOT send a Tracking Preference signal without a user's explicit consent." Having it set by default, without any input from the user, violates that. That seems about as simple as you can get.
I agree with a lot of others. This voluntary DNT stuff doesn't really have any teeth. The only real reason for anyone to honor it is to avoid real regulation (which may or may not actually be enough to keep sites honest). However, enabling it by default will definitely ensure that advertisers do not honor it (at least for that browser). Advertisers will not voluntarily stop for all users of a certain browser based on a default browser setting (where the browser maker is the one deciding, rather than the user). I will admit that this leads to the question of whether or not they'd actually stop even if DNT is explicitly set by the user.
I still feel that a question during the IE first-run wizard is the best solution. MS can present the benefits and privacy implications of choosing whether or not to allow advertiser tracking, without any default value. The setting would be user-set regardless of whether they choose yes or no.
This could actually come back to hurt IE10 users overall. As other commenters have suggested, there's some gray area over what exactly constitutes explicit user consent regarding the setting. If IE10 sets this without any user intervention, advertisers have a not-totally-unreasonable excuse to ignore DNT from IE10, since it's a browser default rather than a user preference. An advertiser could continue to honor DNT for browsers where it is an explicit user preference, while ignoring it for only IE10 (in an effort to reduce ire toward them from DNT users without crippling themselves on all IE10 users). The IE10 users who actually want DNT may find that they can't actually use DNT, since advertisers assume it's just a browser default and ignore it. You end up with DNT working in Firefox, Chrome, etc. (when the user sets the preference) but not ever working in IE10.
DNT is a compromise between users and advertisers. Setting DNT as a browser default shoots that compromise in the face, making it almost expected for advertisers to stop honoring it.
This is similar to Microsoft's attempt to have IE8 render in standards-mode only if a special meta tag was included. This would allow IE8 to render old, broken sites with the old, broken rendering engine while new compliant sites would be rendered with the great new rendering engine (as long as the new page included the special tag to tell IE8 that it really, really, really meant that the code should be rendered as written). They're trying to achieve what end users really want, but going about it in the worst possible way. Is it really that hard to have one more screen asking the user if they want DNT or not? That would completely avoid the issue of whether or not it was an explicit preference set by the user, and pretty much dismiss all of the tech community's complaints. There's still the issue of whether or not advertisers would actually honor it, but that's an issue for all browsers in general.
IE 9 passed all of them. It is a standards compliant browser.
http://saveie6.com/
There is no way to "not even connect to a tracker's web site" because websites who would ignore DNT would be the same websites who don't provide / lie about their privacy policy.
Of course there is; it's called a blacklist. Knowledgeable people or organizations can identify trackers, and publish up to date lists. Some of us are already doing this, using the h***s file (I hope I don't wake up any trolls), but it's not easy for the average user. The browser should have a built in blacklisting facility and especially a mechanism for easy or, better, automatic updating of the blacklist. The user should get a default list (maybe updateable via Windows or Apple update or similar mechanisms), but he should also be able to choose a trusted organization (like the EFF) and subscribe to updated lists of trackers.
With this design, when some web page includes a link pointing to a web bug in the tracker's domain, my browser will just ignore it. With Google's design, the browser will go grab the bug, and ask the (unknown, untrusted, and probably not in the EU, so not covered by their laws) tracker to be kind and lose money on this transaction. I really don't think it'll work.
Whitelisting/blacklisting? LOL
Who has root access to every web server in the world to see if they're tracking visitors or not? Remember, tracking is not limited to cookies.
Who decides which forms of tracking are tracking and which are "tracking"?
Who decides which sites are tracking you and which are not?
Who maintains the list?
Who pays for it?
Microsoft gets money that way? Bing isn't profitable, it's just Microsoft's foray to insure Google doesn't become too powerful. If this screws Google they can pull some of their research out of Bing and into something else. Google's biggest problem is that they aren't diversified. Android is their diversification, but they basically serve it up for free and get people to use their search engine more. Everything Google is built around search just like everything Microsoft is built around Windows....for Microsoft that mindset backfired in the past decade...and I am sure it will for Google too. The good news is that while Google, Microsoft & Apple battle, generally speaking we win.
"But Johann, why would someone be so lame?"
"My child, because *they* know about the possibility to opt out, and find that standing up to something, even though they're not among the victims themselves, is just being silly."
"Is that why they conveniently project their own wickedness on Microsoft, not to mention because it's so super easy, Microsoft generally being evil and all that?"
"Hmmm, you might be on to something here. But then again you're learning from the best! Let's forgive them, for they clearly don't have the faintest fucking idea what they're doing."
Better as in a snail is faster than a rock, but isn't as fast as say an elderly woman, let alone a car.
Bing, while it may be one of the venues in which Microsoft displays ads, isn't Microsoft's online advertising business. Now, admittedly, that unit isn't very profitable, because while giant piles of money come in through it, giant piles of money also go out. But its clearly in Microsoft's interest to find ways to leverage other offerings to improve the profitability of that business.
Sure, that seems to be the case.
Not really; Android is a mechanism for ensuring that the core business doesn't get locked out in favor of vendor-preferred offerings from other mobile OS vendors. It also supports some of their "diversified" offerings, but it isn't really part of their diversification itself, because, as you note "they basically serve it up for free and get people to use their search engine more."
That's not really true. Everything Google is built around the infrastructure that they had to build to support search. A lot of it is related to search, too, but not all of it: App Engine, Cloud Storage, Cloud Engine, BigQuery, Cloud SQL, and a number of Google's cloud services, are all pay services (some of which have free tiers available) which re-sell the distributing computing infrastructure which Google had to build for Search, bur aren't all that search-centered.
Ah, true enough. Though I think the case for default opt-in for organ donation is very strong and clear-cut (this should be done everywhere), while I'm not really sure about do-not-track. In the case of organ donation 1) there's a clear public interest, 2) the people who refuse to donate are essentially free-loading off of the those who opt-in.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
For a very brief period of time when Netscape 4 was the competition, it was comparatively great. If you try to argue, I'll know you never used Netscape 4.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
You trust NoScript? I don't. Not since that incident a few years ago when the author deliberately crippled AdBlock for the express purpose of showing you content from the very ad networks you're worrying about here.
Who has root access to every web server in the world to see if they're tracking visitors or not? Remember, tracking is not limited to cookies.
Strawman, and not a very good one either. You don't need access to "every web server in the world". The solution I proposed solves the bulk of the problem: large trackers will be recognized and blacklisted, precisely because they're large. A number of small trackers may avoid blacklisting, but the only way to do that is to remain small, and thus not much of a nuisance. And cookies have nothing to do with my argument, so I don't really know where this comes from.
Who decides which forms of tracking are tracking and which are "tracking"?
Who decides which sites are tracking you and which are not?
Who maintains the list?
You really haven't read the message you're replying to, have you? I touched on those things in my previous post; however, here it is again: the user has the choice (as opposed to Google's proposal, where the choice is with the ad tracker). He can decide a site is malicious or not, based on whatever criteria he deems important. I expect though that relatively knowledgeable users who don't want to be too bothered will subscribe to a tracker list published by a trusted organization of his choice. And for the average user, Microsoft or Apple or other browser developer can provide a default blacklist automatically updated.
Who pays for it?
What payment are you talking about? The tracker's? The point is exactly that lots of people will stop unwillingly or unknowingly paying the trackers (with their information, that is). Maybe you're talking about the publishers of tracking lists? I assume some may offer the tracking list as a paid service, and if they're good some users may choose to pay. But I'd like to introduce you to this concept of "free software" - look it up, it may surprise you. In the same spirit as free software, I'm pretty sure there'll be lots of community supported tracker lists that users can subscribe to.
You have no way of knowing what Google actually does with your information.
Thus you have no way of knowing if they're tracking you.
Thus a whitelist/blacklist is impossible.
Either you're retarded, or you're the one who's not reading.
Oh please. It was supposed to be opt-in. Advertisers could very well respect DNT as opt-in, because only a small minority would turn it on. And that minority is unlikely to click on ads in the first place. So the financial impact for advertisers would be negilgible, and they would get a PR boost.
But because of Microsoft, a significant number of web users, who were likely to click on ads, will have DNT by default. This makes it very expensive to respect DNT.
Let's hope the advertisers will simply disregard DNT when the UA indicates MSIE 10+.
This move by Microsoft is:
1) **ck Google
2) A PR stunt
What makes you think Mozilla has a material interest on this?
I trust Mozilla to have good intention.
I tagged the story antigoogle.
DNT was supposed to be opt-in. Advertisers would likely respect it, because only a small minority of users would enable it. And that paranoid minority does not click on ads in the first place. So the loss for advertisers would be negilgible, and they would get a PR boost.
But because of Microsoft, a significant number of web users, who were likely to click on ads, will have DNT enabled. This makes it very expensive to respect DNT.
Let's hope the advertisers will simply disregard DNT when the UA indicates MSIE 10+.
This action by Microsoft is:
1) **ck Google
2) A PR stunt