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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?"
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.
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