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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."'"
Isn't that missing the entire point? Or is the do-not-track specification one of those Orwellian-titled things whereby the net effect is exactly the opposite of the name?
I have my browsers not respect their wishes on page composition and ad presentation, so I don't really expect them to respect my do-not-track header either. Their domains would first have to make it past my DNS blackhole anyway.
Of course, by doing this you get folks screaming "You are STEALING content! How do the content creators get paid?!?" I have no problem with websites making a buck, and I would even go back to viewing ads as long as they are not obnoxious or folowing me around the entire net. If they can't respect me enough to honor my choices I can't respect them enough to loan them my eyeballs. The internet was a huge push forward for information sharing, but I simply can't get behind every internet user having a dossier encompassing every site they visit or every purchase they make used for god-knows-what by god-knows-who!
I would even go back to viewing ads as long as they are not obnoxious
As far as I am concerned, the only advertisements that are not obnoxious are the ones that I specifically ask for. When do I specifically ask for advertising? When I search for products on Amazon, when I go to Craigslist, when I use Google Shopping to compare prices, etc. It is no surprise that those things are so overwhelmingly successful (both in terms of money and in terms of utilization): there is no incentive for anyone to block them, because they are giving people something useful and something people want.
The reason advertisers have such a bizarre interpretation of do-not-track is that they know they cannot make any money by respecting people. That's why I use ABP and NoScript: advertisers do not respect me, so I will not let them consume my screen space, CPU cycles or bandwidth.
As for the poor websites that claim they will go under without advertisers...well, maybe they should stand up for their users and say, "No, obnoxious, disrespectful advertising is not allowed on this website." What happened to just showing me a picture that says, "This product is better than the rest!" and leaving it at that?
Palm trees and 8
In other words, DNT is predicated on the idea that advertisers will actually respect user wishes, because otherwise users will respond by blocking ads. The point of this article is that advertisers have shown that they do not respect user wishes; the logical conclusion should be that browsers start including things like ABP by default, until advertisers start respecting DNT again (but that won't happen, so we'll just make ad blocking a standard browser feature). Browser makers must include ad blocking or else DNT will truly be pointless; users, by and large, will not install ad blocking extensions on their own.
Palm trees and 8
I think it would be more harmful to those people junking up the web if we made a browser extension that clicked on every +1, like, and follow button you surf past.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
...then I guess NoScript and AddBlock are fair game. Excellent. Advertisers should not forget that they depend on our attention, and we're not obligated to give it to them.
Well, a fair number of people tried to offer an olive branch in the form of allowing advertising but not tracking people like animals. The advertisers grabbed that olive branch and poked them in the eye with it, so here we are.
The next move will be either total blocking of ads or websites finding some way to enforce no tracking on the advertisers they work with.
The very few advertisers that actually have a modicum of respect for the people they advertise to would be wise to petition the FTC to regulate advertising firmly before people just totally shut them out.
And that's the point that should be hammered at them, that if a voluntary scheme isn't followed, we resort to tools that allow us to pollute their data. I already have the code to 'weaponize' this, should I go that route, and it wouldn't exactly take a whole lot of people (percentage-wise) to pollute the databases. Question is: when/if we organize?
"[I]t is a wise man who admits the limits of his knowledge or skill, and that pretending either causes harm." --Terry Go