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."'"

Comments

Missing the Point?

[kraln]

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?

Re:Missing the Point?

[fast turtle]

And the first thing that the Mozilla Devs need to do is delete the Unique ID for Safe Browsing from the firefox code base as it's a cookie that can't be deleted. For those using Firefox and it's derivitives, change the Safe Browsing ID to "0" and help Poisson Googles Data. What really bothers me about this issue is that even when "In Private" browsing is enabled, this unique ID is being passed to Google, in direct violation of my intentions when entering "In Private" mode. This is just one more reason I rarely use Firefox. Opera has a similar feature and I suspect it does the same. Sorry but Safe Browsing needs to be completely anonymous instead of tracking us like it does now.

Re:This is where someone will say...

[JayRott]

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!

Re:This is where someone will say...

[betterunixthanunix]

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?

Re:More elaborate schemes?

[Elwood P Dowd]

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.