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Advertisers Never Intended To Honor DNT
First time accepted submitter oldlurker writes "After much discussion where many hoped a voluntary Do Not Track standard was agreed with advertisers, it turns out the advertisers already had a very different interpretation than most of us on how to practice it: 'Two big associations, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and the Digital Advertising Alliance, represent 90% of advertisers. Downey says those big groups have devised their own interpretation of Do Not Track. When the servers controlled by those big companies encounter a DNT=1 header, says Downey, "They have said they will stop serving targeted ads but will still collect and store and monetize data."'"
"Please don't eat me, brother Wolf!" cried the Rabbit. "Aw, all right." said the Wolf, rolling his eyes. "I'll just trade you to brother Fox for some hens. Is that ok with you?"
and that is why i use and will continue to use adblock. the advertisers have given me no reason to trust them.
In any other civilised nation, the government. But of course in America, that'll never happen
Why should they honour it? It's the browser which is voluntarily giving out identifiable data! Sort your browser out if you don't want to be tracked.
DNT is the same as saying passwords aren't required, because there's a "do not impersonate me" standard.
I don't think I ever understood the point in the first place.
A polite request to please not track you, made to an industry that exists solely to make money out of tracking people?
Yeah, that was going to work...
So you see no difference between an elected administration and a private entity with no democratic oversight?
At the end of the day, the reason why companies are let doing perfectly dickish things in the US is people believe that the government would be worse. And so vote for people who promise they'll let companies be dicks.
The stupid, it hurts.
"Social compact" - what pretentious bollocks.
Your browser is leaking your info - fix that. Trying to stop people taking advantage is so utterly the wrong approach here, its the same as any security related issue - make your end as secure as you possibly can, because the world is a big wide open and very bad place. You cannot control the other end, but you can control what you are leaking.
Also, pathetic hacks like DNT do not work even when backed with legal status - the internet is not one jurisdiction, but your browser certainly is... fix your data leakage at the source, not at the receiving end.
Stop accepting cookies from anyone except the first origin website for a start - advertisers use their own cookies to track you across sites, using site specific cookies makes tracking you across sites extremely hard. Session cookies aren't an issue - if you are using my website, you don't have any leg to stand on when asking me to not track your usage of my website.
Remove a lot of information from the user agent string. Take it back to browser name, major number, minor number.
Stop allowing plug ins etc to add user agent detail or request header lines.
Treat third party images the same way as cookies.
Rigidly enforce plugin security, so things like Flash cannot maintain cookies etc outside of the browsers control.
Etc etc etc.
There are plenty of things that the browsers need to fess up and fix before DNT can be considered to not be a joke - *asking* third parties not to do "X" when you are leaking that data voluntarily to them each time you request an object is just stupid.
If this was anything else, the onus would be on the one leaking the information - if your medical records were being leaked through system insecurity then the one being decried here on Slashdot would be the source of the leak, not the recipient! Why is this any different?
How about we just go back to pushing ad blocking software? The point of DNT was to show that ad blocking is not necessary, because advertisers will respect users if they can just get a little feedback. Now we see that that is untrue, so let's ditch DNT and get back to ABP etc.
The whole argument for DNT is that advertisers will be compelled to follow it, because if they do not do so then users will start blocking ads. Advertisers are not respecting DNT, so we have to deploy ad blockers now, or else DNT was truly pointless.
Palm trees and 8
"You are STEALING content! How do the content creators get paid?!?"
Content creators do not have a right to have their business model work out. Besides, most ads pay per click, not per view these days (though both kinds still exist).
There are many other business models. An online game of mine (BattleMaster) runs entirely on donations, for example. I'm very proud of having been able to run this game for 12 years now, and there has never been a single banner or pop-up ad on the site. Not in the game, not in the wiki, not in the forum.
Does it allow me to quit my day job? Nope. Does it pay for its own bills (hosting, etc.)? Absolutely.
There are Freemium models, there are subscription models like The Onion where you get a few free articles and then they ask you to subscribe. And, of course, there is the old "You want something? Pay up and you get it." system. You know, the one that mankind has been using for a few thousand years?
The Internet has been and still is experimenting with various ways of making money. If yours doesn't work out, stop whining and start taking the possibility into consideration that your business model is flawed.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org