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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.'"
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.
John