Chrome To Get 'Do Not Track'

puddingebola tips news that support for the 'do-not-track' privacy setting will soon be coming to Google Chrome. The feature was implemented for Chromium v23.0.1266.0 in a recent revision. Google has said DNT will make it into the public release of Chrome by the end of year. This will bring Chrome up to speed with Firefox, which has had it for a while, and IE 10, which will have it turned on by default. As for why Google is the last of the three do implement it, the LA Times points out a post earlier this year from Google's Susan Wojcicki: 'There’s been a lot of debate over the last few years about personalization on the web. We believe that tailoring your web experience — for example by showing you more relevant, interest-based ads, or making it easy to recommend stuff you like to friends — is a good thing.'"

Comments

Translation

[RaceProUK]

"DNT will hurt our advertising revenue"

Re:Translation

[plover]

This would be apt if Google did not already provide a way for users to universally opt out of doubleclick, and a chrome plugin that controls your opt out at key internet advertising associations.

In other words, "Google already provides a combination of non-intuitive and user-download-required ad hoc ways to do one fourth of something that's being standardized elsewhere, so we should think it's OK for them to ignore the standardizations under way."

Hmm... for a minute there I thought you were shilling for Google. But now I realize you're just cognitively impaired.

Re:Translation

[betterunixthanunix]

Microsoft is planning on destroying the standard/convention by not implementing it properly in IE; e.g. by Default pretending that the user has opted out by supplying a DNT 1 value; instead of the user taking no preference.

This sounds like the right thing to me. If most users are unaware of how pervasive the tracking is these days, then it should be opt-in. Let people who at least know that there is something to opt in to make a decision about opting in.

Of course, then the web advertisers would just ignore DNT. Which is what will happen anyway.

The real answer is not to politely ask these companies to stop tracking us; what reason do they have to care about our wishes? The real answer is to make ABP a standard feature in browsers, with a whitelist option for users who actually want advertising (but which warns them that advertisers will track their browsing habits -- with clear, unambiguous, easy-to-understand wording). We made spam filtering a default for email, and then spam became manageable; we should make ad blocking the default for the web, until it is brought back down to reasonable levels.

I have no sympathy for web advertisers. They should be excluded from the debate, just like spammers were excluded.

Re:Translation

[vux984]

I installed Windows 8 yesterday on a test system; and the Internet Explorer setup made it very clear that by proceeding with the default settings that DNT would be turned on.

If we live in a world where clicking "I agree" on a scrollable wall of text that you can't otherwise skip amounts to accepting a contract then deciding to go with the default settings which has all of around 7 bullet points saying what it does ... incluidng turning DNT on, then that absolutely counts as the user making an explicit choice to use DNT. The GP post is either uninformed about how IE 10 sets up or is pretty butt hurt that IE 10 makes DNT the path of "least resistance".

Re:Translation

[betterunixthanunix]

Most popular web sites would not exist without advertising to pay the hosting bills and fund creation of content

Cry me a river -- those websites did not stand up for their users and say, "do not track our users," when they made deals with advertisers. They could have based their advertising revenue on impressions, serving the images from their own servers, and made enough money to pay the bills. Websites that were foolish enough to accept the advertising terms that led to this situation should accept the consequences of those decisions: ad blocking, annoyed users, and reduced revenue.

Turning DNT on by default, and making advertisers honor it, means most users will get badly targeted ads they are even less interested in.

If that annoys people, let them opt-in to targeted advertising. If people are not annoyed, it is because they never wanted the advertising to begin with.

Furthermore, if users do want targeted advertising, we can do that in a privacy-preserving way. Instead of talking about trusting advertisers to respect users who say, "Don't track me," let's talk about advertising that relies on private information retrieval, so that people can have their browsers track their history and fetch relevant ads in a privacy-preserving way. This is not some unheard-of technology -- PIR has been known for decades, it can be done in a highly efficient way, and it can give people ads they want to see. Yet nobody respects users enough to do this; this could have been added to HTML5 as a special "advertisement" tag, but it was not.

A lot of web content will not be created, or will move behind a paywall. Is that really a good thing?

If that would indeed happen, then the problem is not with ad blocking, DNT, or advertising; the problem is with the web itself. I doubt that this doomsday scenario would actually happen, but if it did, the appropriate response would be to return to peer to peer networking, so that "content" creators do not run up big bills (see, for example, famous posters on Usenet, who did not need to partner with advertisers or run up huge bandwidth bills). One of the great things about the Internet is that the model is not based on "creators" and "consumers" -- any node can send or receive data, and we are not bound to the "broadcasting" model that we see the web turning into (and which aligns more closely with cable and satellite TV networks).

Ads fund the vast majority of content people care about on the web. Spam does not. There is a large difference.

Perhaps, but I view these as security problems. With spam, we want to prevent unwanted messages from clogging out inboxes and possibly tricking users; with web tracking, we want to prevent our personal information from being amassed and stored indefinitely. Legal approaches, "play nice" approaches like DNT, etc. are generally bad ways to solve security problems.

Advertising is not necessarily a bad thing. When I needed a new couch, I went to one of the most successful advertising websites in the world: Craigslist. The difference is that Craigslist is not recording who my friends are, what my emails say, or where I read my news; Craigslist lets me search for the things I want, and lets people who have things to sell advertise through that search system. I am not sure if Craigslist can be used to monetize the web; I am not creative enough to see a way for Craigslist to add something to a site like Slashdot that would be productive for anyone. On the other hand, Slashdot could just display a static image with some brand on it, and by seeing that, the brand would be advertised to me.

When I refer to web advertisers, I refer to those that are tracking people, because that is what most web advertising is (Craigslist-style advertising is, sadly, not the bulk of advertising). These same companies also tried to push "pop ups," "pop under," and

Re:Translation

[mysidia]

You may be conflating advertisers with trackers; not all trackers are advertisers though. Do not track may include things like remembering users' preferences/personalizations when visiting the same site again later, for example: forum comment display preferences.

This sounds like the right thing to me. If most users are unaware of how pervasive the tracking is these days, then it should be opt-in. Let people who at least know that there is something to opt in to make a decision about opting in.

Go read the standard. DNT is an extra header that has 3 values null: User has not expressed a preference
0 User has chosen to OPT IN to tracking
1 User has chosen to OPT OUT of tracking

Until the human being has chosen to opt out, NULL is what the browser is supposed to send

Sending 1 by default, just means the sites cannot tell the difference between a user who has chosen OPT OUT, and a user who has done nothing at all, therefore, they will just ignore DNT, because the header no longer expresses useful information.

Previously, advertisers were taking flak and getting unwanted negative PR, and potential government scrutiny, for ignoring not honoring Do not tracking.

Now with the MSIE change, they will have a valid excuse for ignoring the flag, and the scrutiny, and pressure to respect DNT will definitely end, result: DNT will become worthless, it will become a complete NOOP, everyone will be OPTED back in, per-site "opt out cookie-based schemes (and cookies that expire)" will again be the only way for users to express opt out intent, and the internet will be back in the same situation we were in before DNT had even been proposed.

Re:Pointless?

[kvvbassboy]

The point is that advertisers WILL (and want to) take this seriously on the server level, as long as the user KNOWINGLY sets the DNT option on. But, if it is abused by certain software vendors, the whole exercise is going to be rendered pointless.

repeat after me: I am not an aggregate

[epine]

We believe that tailoring your web experience â" for example by showing you more relevant, interest-based ads, or making it easy to recommend stuff you like to friends â" is a good thing.

This is "your" as the anonymous plural. I'm an individual, not an aggregate, thank you very much. I mainly have any friends left at all for not presuming that my tastes are theirs. Strangely, I surround myself with people who have strong minds and distinct tastes. My social circle is not an echo-chamber of group think.

From [all-caps title suppressed]

These Big Data issues are important, but there are bigger things afoot. As you move into a society driven by Big Data most of the ways we think about the world change in a rather dramatic way. For instance, Adam Smith and Karl Marx were wrong, or at least had only half the answers. Why? Because they talked about markets and classes, but those are aggregates. They're averages.

While it may be useful to reason about the averages, social phenomena are really made up of millions of small transactions between individuals. There are patterns in those individual transactions that are not just averages, they're the things that are responsible for the flash crash and the Arab spring. You need to get down into these new patterns, these micro-patterns, because they don't just average out to the classical way of understanding society. We're entering a new era of social physics, where it's the details of all the particlesâ"the you and meâ"that actually determine the outcome.

Reasoning about markets and classes may get you half of the way there, but it's this new capability of looking at the details, which is only possible through Big Data, that will give us the other 50 percent of the story. We can potentially design companies, organizations, and societies that are more fair, stable and efficient as we get to really understand human physics at this fine-grain scale. This new computational social science offers incredible possibilities.

I don't mind my search results personalized, but my preference here is to have specific crud removed, not favoured results promoted. Alibaba and scribd and certain content mills would be early casualties, and no link to Elsevier in the top ten, ever. Mostly I can skim a list of 50 search results in the blink of an eye, thank you very much (and I don't find the skim gestalt useless, either).

Here's the thing, Google, you don't have to guess. Just give me a place to dial in my personal preferences, and then you'll know for certain: I don't want those stinking suggestions. My one burning desire in the user interface for the last decade is more capacity to disaggregate myself from faddish workflows. Ubuntu 10.10, that's how I like it, uh huh uh huh.

(*) I use a FF extension Make-Link to copy and paste links. Sometimes when you copy an all-caps link it comes out properly, if the all-caps was coded as a presentation style. I used to have an extension decaps to deal with this, but it broke in some FF upgrade. Over my dead body I'm retyping the title by hand to change the case, and neither am I leaving it there to scream at people.

This is the IP evil bit all over again

[Dwedit]

This is basically the "Evil Bit" all over again. It's completely non-binding and ineffective.

What actually works is using Adblock and Requestpolicy, because that actually prevents third party tracking.

Re:This is the IP evil bit all over again

[shutdown -p now]

It's only ineffective if it's not legally enforced. EU has already introduced a law that requires companies to avoid tracking you if you explicitly request to not be tracked. It was not yet successfully argued in court whether DNT constitutes such an explicit request, but it most likely does. At that point any tracking would become illegal.

The "evil bit" idea is only useless against malicious parties that don't care about compliance with the law, e.g. when they're anonymous. This is not the case here.

Re:Tracking

[kllrnohj]

"find a way around it"?

I think you mean "just don't bother implementing support on the server side". By default DNT doesn't do anything at all. DNT only works on sites that take the engineering time to support it on their servers. Google has gone out of their way and spent time and money to support DNT - why would they then search for a way around it? That doesn't make any sense.

Re:Pointless?

[plover]

No, advertisers have no business value in taking this seriously, and every incentive to find ways around it. Advertisers know that targeted advertising is both more effective and less offensive than random advertising. And today, in order to provide targeted advertising, tracking provides an overall picture of an individual's tastes and habits.

Targeted advertising will continue, but in a different fashion. Instead of tracking you at an individual level, I predict they'll find ways to identify surfers at an aggregate level. Perhaps cookies will contain your advertising preferences instead of your identity. If you visit a few car forums every so often, the advertiser might store the CAR=2 value in your cookie, if you visit Etsy a lot they'll store CRAFT=5, and if you visit a political campaign donation site, they'll store SUCKER=9. Then, as you surf the web, if you're identified as a SUCKER>3, the ads will feature Vote Rombama. They're not tracking you personally or identifying your habits, but they're still targeting you.

The bigger problem, and why I think Google was the big holdout, is Google Analytics. They don't use the tracking data just for advertising. They sell information about shopping habits to marketers. If you search for "stereo reviews", then click the links to stereo-reviews.com and hifiworld.com, then buy a Coby home stereo for $299 from shopping.com, they can provide that data to stereo retailers around the net: people who buy overpriced crap surf believe the information on stereo-reviews.com and hifiworld.com. Killing tracking kills that intelligence business.

Re:Tracking

[mysidia]

While I like the idea of DNT, it won't be long until folks find a way around it.

What i'd like to see with DNT is a response header for each HTTP request for GET and HEAD operations, and both requestor and response headers to have _TAGS_ or other identifiers indicating more detailed optouts and more details about the server's policy (E.g. they might declare that they won't track the user, but may retain logs for 24 hours of their HTTP requests), not just relying on the client "blindly" sending a DNT: 1 request header, and the server being "on their honor" to respect that.

Instead there should be a response header from the server to be treated as a declaration of how the server will treat a request with certain DNT flags, or to what extent. Browsers that change their policy based on the reponse header (for example, the browser might make a HEAD request against / with referrer suppressed, to obtain a DNT declaration, before accepting a script or IMG tag for a remote domain, or requesting any pages from the host), and there could be a blacklist of sites that disclose false information in the DNT header.

Sites with no declaration will have functionality cutoff like cookies/remote load.

Sites in the blacklist get a "This site may track you and ignore your privacy preferences." error message, when users attempt to visit the site. And they will have to expand some hidden panels to find a 'visit this site anyway' link, which when clicked will open up a warning dialog, requiring confirmation.

Or we could not trust servers

[betterunixthanunix]

Why are we trusting web servers to be honest? Advertising should be opt-in, not "opt-out, and then only if the server agrees to let you opt-out."

We didn't bring spam down to manageable levels by politely asking spammers not to send us email. We brought spam down to manageable levels by filtering it so that it did not even reach our inboxes. Why are we treating web advertising any differently?

Re:Or we could not trust servers

[Miseph]

"Why are we treating web advertising any differently?

Probably because we like having "free" content on the web, and "free" content is, generally, paid for by advertising.

Maybe you're one of those rare birds who likes the idea of paying subscription fees or micro-transactions every time you want to look at a website, but most of us are happier with the occasional unobtrusive banner ad.

Re:Or we could not trust servers

[betterunixthanunix]

Maybe you're one of those rare birds who likes the idea of paying subscription fees or micro-transactions every time you want to look at a website, but most of us are happier with the occasional unobtrusive banner ad.

The 90s called, they want their web advertising back. In today's world, web ads are not unobtrusive, they are not remotely privacy-respecting, and they are bad for web users. That system needs to be stopped, and the sooner, the better.

IE10 DNT is NOT on by default

[benjymouse]

The user is presented with a "setup" screen at which he/she can choose "express" or "advanced" setup.

The screen *clearly* spells out that *if* you choose express settings then DNT will be switched on.

You are confounding default settings (settings which take effect unless you explicitly go through a change) with a *choice* of grouped settings.

Yes, the settings are grouped. Yes, the users may not know what exactly could be the benefits of tracking (or the benefits to Google?).

But, the user actually *do* make a choice. It is not like the screen merely says "express or advanced?". It actually outlines what will be set.

To claims that this is "default" and that the user has not made a choice is simply wrong. It is the *easy* choice, but that is not the same.

Advertisers and their shills like Roy Fielding may not like the fact that the process does stack the deck against tracking as it makes the DNT the easy choice. To me that is just "right back at ya!". Thanks for all your toolbars, btw. But no thanks.

Re:IE10 DNT is NOT on by default

[allo]

most people select express, because express is right for their concerns. Wouldn't you think, DNT is right for the normal person? Who wants to be tracked? So how is it wrong?

belief

[Tom]

We believe that tailoring your web experience â" for example by showing you more relevant, interest-based ads, or making it easy to recommend stuff you like to friends â" is a good thing.

"believe" being the key word there.

AdBlock all the way. I don't brake for ads anymore.

Yeah, right...

[19061969]

Quoth: Google's Susan Wojcicki: 'We believe that tailoring your web experience â" for example by showing you more relevant, interest-based ads, or making it easy to recommend stuff you like to friends â" is a good thing.'"

Except that I did a *lot* of research (getting a phd for the first few years) that says that tailoring experience misleads people into thinking the stuff around them is more meaningful than it is.

In some ways, the survivalist approach, while less satisfying, produces much more accurate mental models of information sources.

I really think that Google had a golden age around 2002 when they had masses of information but little customisation - but let users decide things for themselves.

Sigh. I'm a fan of DuckDuckGo now and not just because I'm #1 for my important key phrases. DDG doesn't try to 'help' - it just lets you use your brain.