Slashdot Mirror
Think Tank's Website Rejects Browser Do-Not-Track Requests
alphadogg writes "The website for the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) now tells visitors it will not honor their browsers' do-not-track requests as a form of protest against the technology pushed by privacy groups and parts of the U.S. government. The tech-focused think tank on Friday implemented a new website feature that detects whether visitors have do-not-track features enabled in their browsers and tells them their request has been denied. 'Do Not Track is a detrimental policy that undermines the economic foundation of the Internet,' Daniel Castro, senior analyst at the ITIF wrote in a blog post. 'Advertising revenue supports most of the free content, services, and apps available on the Internet.'"
Here I thought awesome people were responsible for most of the finest free offerings of the internet, turns out it was just penis enlargement all along.
Can't the browser just give bogus data on request?
I'll just keep using AdBlock Plus, NoScript, etc. and they won't get me to see any ads at all. If on the other hand they respected my desire not to be tracked, I'd have given some simple unobtrusive ads a chance. They're only shooting themselves in the foot.
So they're afraid they aren't going to make all the money they have been making with advertisements.
My take on this: go get a real job.
Joke's on them. I run NoScript.
We don't deny the right for any site owner to do advertising. If we don't want to see the adds, we can stop going on the site. But what's not normal is tracking visitors across multiple sites and without their consent or knowledge. I recommend everyone to install the ghostery pluggin, just to see how far this has gone (eg: so many sites are displaying trackers from 3rd parties).
It is possible to advertise online without tracking users. It may not be quite as profitable, but it served the Internet well in the early days.
Besides, you don't need tracking to know that Slashdot's audience is full of nerds who will buy open their wallets to companies like ThinkGeek, NewEgg, etc.
Given that the message depends on JS, most people who set DNT are either incredibly naive, or block JS too.
The internet (spelled with a small 'i' despite my spell checker) worked just fine before the economic discount-superstore model was imposed upon it in the mid 90s.so if you don't mind ITIF, I'm gonna go start my own internet... with star trek and porn.
or how about pay for your own fucking bandwidth? I pay for mine.. You pay for yours. You don't have the right to throw up a pile of shit with ads and expect me to hobble my computer and experience to make you money. It's not cable tv.
Do Not Track does not mean Do Not Advertise. It just means don't collect my personal data from every site I visit and form a profile of my habits.
Honestly, from the way these people are talking you'd think advertising never worked in the past when it wasn't possible to do that.
Do Not Track essentially enables people who are concerned about privacy to support the web page owners by still being targets of advertising. To reject their request means "we don't want you looking at our ads" and pushes these people to simply use adblock. Mind that people who are already blocking ads have no use from DNT.
There was one crucial piece of information missing from TFA: exactly why would a non-insignificant fraction of the population in large would even care that this particular think-tank's piddly web site exists? It would be news if say, some major national bank's web site blocked visitors who've enabled the do-not-track header. That, I can understand, would be news. But...
1) Who is ITIF, and
2) Who cares about their web site?
As soon as someone explains that, we can move ahead to the next step.
The economic foundation of the internet has nothing to do with advertising. The current state of the world wide web does, but they're different things. For a supposedly technology-focused think-tank, I'd expect them to understand that difference.
The economic foundation of the internet is the advantage gained from interconnecting networks. You care for your bit of network, yet have access to everyone else's too. In return you carry other networks' traffic just as they carry yours. As such, the internet's foundations are those of "being a cooperative".
The world wide web, now, that's something different. It's the conceptual web made out of various parties' "content" linked together. Since it can be used to show pictures and text from elsewhere, advertising is easily added to many a page. Advertising is used to fund large parts of that, and it's an interesting exercise to imagine what the www would be like without the advertising income. There'd be many fewer websites, especially since many of them currently survive by the grace of advertising income, even exist for the sole purpose of attracting "clicks" to be sold to advertisers. Those would go away right quick.
What would be left? Discuss.
The internet is already paid for. Every home user and business pays their ISP, every small ISP pays their upstream, every large ISP pays to run their lines and to peer, etc.
Advertising on the internet is a huge assumption. It is assumed that people will:
1. See the ads.
2. Click on them if they're interested.
3. Buy product if they're interested.
There is no obligation for anyone to do any of these. No contract, written, social, or otherwise, requires people to even see the ads, and as this failed business model dwindles, companies have started tracking users and harvesting information as a business model, simply because they can.
Where do these overblown assholes get off telling us it's the Economic Foundation of the Internet?
Does anyone really give a shit what this particular group has to say?
Your elected representatives, who look to outfits like this guidance in turning file sharing in to a crime akin to detonating nail bombs on crowded busses.
http://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Debate-over-Internet-piracy-legislation-heats-up-2576620.php
-- Using the preview button since 2005
From the link:
However, privacy advocates do not like this so they have been pushing for the creation and implementation of a Do Not Track standard. The problem is that if users are not tracked, then websites cannot deliver targeted advertising. Instead, websites would only be able to use non-targeted advertising which does not generate as much revenue.
Well... yeah. That's the whole point.
If your business idea needs the revenue from targeted advertising and the revenue from NON-targeted advertising would mean you'd have to close down, then your business idea is not good enough. It does NOT mean that everybody else has to endure being tracked so that you can make more money. Of course, you're free to prevent whoever you do not like from visiting your website. But your sense of entitlement ("we cannot have user privacy because *I* deserve more money!") is wrong.
Not that I think those "do not track" settings ever will work, because they rely on the bad guys cooperating, and advertisers clearly have shown over the years that they will do ANYTHING to get around advertising restrictions. But the general idea (users should be able to decline targeted advertising) is good.
I can understand why this sort of activity is disliked — I don't browse without AdBlock Plus, and now will investigate Ghostery too — but, I would have thought that, within the bounds of the law, their webserver, it's their prerogative to host what they want / construct their site how they want?
If I want to put up a whole load of flashing banners when you visit my site (I don't, but, if I did...), and that clogs up your bandwidth, that's my prerogative, just as it is your prerogative not to visit the site?
For the site at question here, it's simple — I'm not going to be visiting. But I do think it's their prerogative to serve up poor content with ads, if that's what they choose to put on their webserver.
Once a site delivering free content is popular enough to have significant operating overhead, it's probably worth the effort and money to formally organize the content provider as a for-profit or non-profit entity.
The local newspaper in my town of approximately 100 thousand sells subscriptions to readers who want more than a fixed quota of articles per month.
Wikipedia has fundraisers.
Both of these free content providers have found ways to fund their efforts without using targeted ads.
Suggesting that ad revenue will disappear without personalized ads seems to overlook the fact that many people are willing to pay a fair price for content instead of expecting ads to support their mooching.
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
Browsing http://www.itif.org/ with noscript installed or javascript disabled, I don't even see their rejection of my DNT header unless and until I enable javascript for the site.
. . . from a site that goes out of its way to block adblocking users that I couldn't live without. It seems to me that those running sites who do this sort of thing vastly overestimate the value of their "content."
Absolutely. I would argue against any attempt to prevent someone from running AdBlock Plus or the like — filtering what you allow onto your computer (whether filtering what you ask for from someone else or, less usefully, asking for it and then not displaying it) is absolutely your prerogative too.
DNT is a slightly challenging use case, to my mind. As I understand it, it means that I request everything on a page, but also send an additional request that some things do not happen with my data. I'm not actually filtering anything, or not requesting certain parts of the page — I'm relying, even trusting, the content owner to behave in accordance with my wishes. Which is partly why I'm not giving up ABP any time soon, just as a promise from everyone on the Internet not to do something I don't want them to do in terms of accessing my server would not lead me to dropping my firewall.
This is one area where we are not given enough credit, but the Internet as we know is here thanks to Free Software.
Sure, most people doesn't realize this, and of those that do, most won't accept it, but it's still the truth. What allowed the internet to grow so big? Do you think Google would exist if they had to pay an expensive Unix license for every machine they own? Sure, they might be able to afford it now, but they didn't years ago, and they would have never gotten this far. Even now it would be a huge hit on their wallet. Take the Internet as it exists right now. Remove GNU/Linux and *BSD, Bind, Apache, SSH, MySQL/PostgreSQL, PHP, Perl, Python, nginx, squid, rsync. I can go on and on. Now remove 90% of all web apps out there. Remove Wordpress, Joomla, and just about every other CMS. Now take the client side. Remove KHTML (And with that webkit, and therefore Safari and Chrome), remove Firefox. Remove Android. What are we left with? I think if you remove all Free Software from the Internet, aside from the fact that there would be no root DNS servers and most of the routers would be down, and what servers are still intact? microsoft.com? I'm pretty sure even they relay on Free Software.
So, Fuck off ITIF. It's not advertisement. Many people think content should be pay for, that content couldn't exist without advertisement, well,you are using the most advanced infrastructure ever created to create and serve your content, and the infrastructure was created for free. Certainly we can create some GPL'd cat pictures, porn and tech articles to replace your stupid content. Please go away.
All the pro-advertisement self-entitled idiots are using trillions of dollars of infrastructure the community created for free, and they go "But our dong jokes are priceless. We need money!". Well fuck you.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Bull.. Everything, including(especially) Slashdot is is much faster when their ad servers are blocked. It's actually very dramatic. Sorry Slashdot, you gotta fix that if you want me to see your ads.
Browsers need to fix tracking, like they did for popups and malware sites. Aggressive technical measures can bring tracking networks in line. Tracking networks pay popular websites to include their crap and then sell the data they collect. Make it a pain for websites that include 300 tracking networks and we'll be attacking the money.
At the very least browsers should:
* Lockdown the user-agent string
* Force plugins (like flash) to either not have cookies (or storage), or let the browser control any tracking
* Raise awareness by warning users when they are obviously being tracked
* Limit the number of cookies generated by visiting a single web page -- don't let one page lead to 300 cookies from hundreds of domains
Here's an idea: the browser won't download anything from any 3rd party domain, unless the primary website asserts responsibility for the 3rd party domain (either in source or headers). No website would want to take responsibility for an advertising network, much less a tracking network. Advertisers would be under enormous scrutiny to not track people, because their clients would be the ones getting sued.
Here's another idea: Mozilla runs it's own adblock-style blocking list. Companies would have to convince Mozilla they're not tracking people, and possible sign legal agreements to enforce it. Mozilla could simply block any site they don't think is acting honorably. If they collected info on 0 byte images they'd know most of the worst players right away.
Another idea: browsers could auto-change identities every 10 minutes; like switching to a new profile. If cookies from active tabs were saved it would eliminate 80% of the problems without the user having to do anything.
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
Run Noscript and Better Privacy. Set cookies to be accepted and then deleted when the browser closes. Set Better Privacy to delete flash and other more persistent tracking tags when the browser closes. Only enable javascript temporarily on pages you really want to see -- most of the time I'll see the page is not usable without javascript and just close that window. Want to serve me a click through ad? Fine, I'll just close that window. There isn't a page on the internet that I need to see, and I certainly don't care to visit one that wants to jam adverts down my throat. And yet I just bought some more stuff from a Google-served unobtrusive text ad the other day. If Google can appeal to someone as ad-hostile as I am, is it any wonder they're doing so well when everyone else is apparently circling the drain?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
What's funny is that DNT doesn't say "Don't send me advertisements.". They're just throwing a tantrum, threatening to take all their toys and go home if they can't do absolutely anything they want any time they want. I say treat 'em like you'd treat the other 2-year-old on the playground who does that: shrug and go play with everybody else and their toys. Ain't worth puttin' up with the brat's drama.
And this is me adding them to my hosts file:
0.0.0.0 [tab] www.itif.org [enter]
Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at www.itif.org.
Other sites similarly "standing on principle" in regards to this in a similar way will also be added and I encourage everyone to deep-six in whatever means seems convenient.
It's as if there was nobody making money through advertising before tracking.
--
BMO
tv does not track, but you better believe any non-open source tivo-like box DOES track you.
your set-top box (not a dvr) also records what you've pressed and sends that data upstream to the provider.
that was one of the reasons I had little problem dropping cable-tv/sat-tv and their dvrs. with my myth box, I know for a fact that no one is tracking what buttons I press or what shows I record/watch.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
It should be a prominent enable button. However, AdBlockPlus has the right idea: let the users decide if they want advertising, and let them decide if they want to allow tracking.
It is telling, though, that when I install ABP on a less-technical user's computer, I hear no complaints -- nobody seems to miss all that advertising. Perhaps website operators should take a hint.
Palm trees and 8
I think you each have valid views, but the issue as I see it, isn't quite what either of your points are about.
It's the sense of entitlement.
Some folks seem to think that because they create content, or enable others to create content, on the internet, that they are entitled to make money.
(Sounds like some people from the music industry.)
You can try to make money, or don't try to make money. But if you are trying, and fail, don't blame anyone else, and don't bitch and moan that we're a bunch of no-gooders ruining your fun because we don't want you looking over our shoulders and following us around recording what we do.
Not sure who decided the internet population is there to provide income. It's not.
I'm pretty sure if I was standing following one of these people around all day in 'the real world' taking video and notes of everything they did, they would be pretty upset. And when I said "You have to let me, I am making money doing this," I doubt that would make them okay with it.
At least in the real world, when someone is peeking in your windows, or reading over your shoulder, sooner or later you'll notice them, and possibly have them charged. Why is it different on the internet? Because most people can't see you snooping around, it's okay?
You may joke about Slashdot editors, but actually, editing user-submitted articles is not necessarily something people need to be paid to do. Many scientific journals are edited by volunteers, and really, why shouldn't a website that people read for the user comments (like Slashdot) be run by volunteers? Users are already moderators on Slashdot, and we have metamoderation to help cope with the miscreants who manage to get mod points.
Palm trees and 8
Well, but if you're not going to that site, you're not one of their users. Their users are already OK with ads being a tradeoff for free, good content.
I get to read very informative publications like Foreign Policy, the Economist, and the Guardian that I would never have a chance to read otherwise. It's not all just an utter wasteland of Perez Hilton and so forth out here.
It's a great bargain, and at any time I can just turn off JavaScript to not see that ads (if I like), which I sometimes do. DNT activists are threatening to go nuclear, which is just too far.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Their users are already OK with ads being a tradeoff for free, good content.
No, most users have no idea what is happening, nor that there is a way to stop it. That is one of the things that is being exploited: ignorance.
Let's put it this way: nobody has ever complained about me installing ABP on their computer. I have received thanks from some people, who found that websites were easier to read without the advertisements. These are not people who agreed to a tradeoff; they never knew they were trading anything, they only knew that by paying for Internet service they were getting access to those websites.
It's a great bargain,
No, it's a trap. Bargains are things that people agree to, and no advertiser has actually asked for my agreement in being tracked. Bargains are not opt-out, they are opt-in. Craigslist is where you go for a bargain: you tell Craigslist what you want, and they show you advertising for it (and they don't need to track you around the web to figure out what ads to show you! Amazing!).
at any time I can just turn off JavaScript to not see that ads
This is not true. While keeping Javascript disabled helps with advertising, there are numerous websites that will not render at all without Javascript enabled, and some that create a hover ad and insist that you use Javascript to get rid of it -- thus making reading an article impossible without either enabling Javascript or installing ABP.
The problem with online advertisers is that they do not actually care about whether or not you get a chance to read the page you were trying to read. In fact, they want you to leave that page by clicking on an advertisement. That is why popups became so popular: advertisers found a new way to annoy people, and they did not care about whether or not those people were actually being annoyed, as long as they were clicking on the ads. That is why browsers made popup blocking a default feature.
Palm trees and 8
Often there's only room for one community in a particular space
Indeed; sci.crypt on Usenet comes to mind. Funny how nobody can "lose interest" in "running" sci.crypt, because no single person is responsible for running it.
Maybe the model of the web is just not the right model for an online community. Maybe a peer-to-peer model is better. We could build it right into web browsers if we were willing to, and create a better way to run obscure, low-budget blogs and forums. Of course, we would first need to convince browser makers that the only people whose interests matter is their users, which seems like an uphill battle (after all, if browser makers cared about user interests, DNT would not have been created; we would have just made ABP a standard feature).
Palm trees and 8
If you are only going to allow people to visit your website when it turns a profit for you, why not skip the technological arms race entirely and just use this "new" idea:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paywall
Oh, what, you are worried that all those people who run blogs at no cost to their users and without advertising might run you out of business? Sounds like you are the one with an entitlement problem in that case...
Palm trees and 8
The first web was just mostly .edu site.
Which lasted until there were a significant number of non-researchers connected to the Internet, at which point online stores started to appear as well.
The second web was commercialized, with annoying ads (popup, autoplay, with sound, garish, etc.). Part of the reason they were seen as annoying is that they weren't anything you'd be interested in.
No, the ads were annoying because they would slow computers down by eating CPU cycles, they would play music that people were not expected and which was not that good, they would open windows that people did not want or expect, and so forth. These are just as annoying whether or not you are interested in whatever product is being hawked.
Say you've got a general-interest magazine, like Time. What ads are advertisers supposed to show you? For senior diseases? For Corvettes? Show anything, and it's bound to annoy major parts of the audience.
That is the problem with unsolicited advertising: it annoys people. Always. Regardless of whether or not it is something people might actually be interested in. Targeted ads are not any less annoying than any other sort of unsolicited advertising. The only advertisements that do not annoy people are those which people actually seek out -- the sorts of ads that you get when you use Craigslist or Google Shopping.
The current web has it about right: no popups, no autoplay, no sound.
That is not because the advertisers suddenly realized that being annoying is bad, it is because browsers stopped letting them create those things. Now we have hover ads, flash ads, and other annoyances, and browser makers are not stopping advertisers anymore, because they are now in bed with them.
You get shown the stuff that you've shown an interest in.
See, that is why advertisers were not content to advertise to adults. Adults ignore unsolicited ads. That is why advertisers started targeting children (who nag at their parents to buy what they see advertised to them) and teenagers (who can be tricked into thinking they are not giving in to advertisements; see e.g. MTV).
And people that absolutely can't stand ads (for whatever reason), can still turn them off.
No, people who do not want unsolicited advertisements (maybe I should save on keystrokes and just use the word "spam") cannot simply "turn them off" -- we need to install extra software (ad blocking software), disable Javascript, and take additional precautions to prevent shady companies from tracking us. Even after doing all that, advertisers still fight us; we are in a technological arms race with them, because they simply cannot take "no" for an answer. DNT was meant to give advertisers a way to show that they do actually respect our wishes; it seems that they do not, which is why we need to get back to pushing ABP, NoScript, Ghostery, Tor, and all the other defensive measures that we need just to keep our peace.
The problem with your argument is that you are pushing for an opt-out system, one in which people have to be informed enough, patient enough, and technically capable enough to protect themselves from advertisers. What really need is an opt-in system, so that people who actually want unsolicited adver
Palm trees and 8
Despite the marketing speak of marketers, tracking users does not help with targetting ads as it misses the temporal aspect of targetting. It doesn't matter if they know I was interested in apple trees three months ago, or yesterday, because when I'm reading that Time article, at that exact point in time I don't give a fuck about apple trees. Unless it actually happens to be a Time article about apple trees, in which case tracking me is pointless, as they could, cheaper and more accurately, target the reader by using the contents of the article.
Any worthwhile targetting can use the contents of the presented material. The most worthwhile avenue is price comparison sites where you pretty much know everyone browsing them is a potential customer at the specific time they're browsing. Bar that you've got special interest sites and articles, where the reader may have an interest in the subject matter, with a fair chance at catching them in a research-for-purchase point in time. But tracking? Any historical data you have is worthless compared to knowing what they're browsing right now and that simply doesn't require tracking.
Show something relevant to the article I'm reading. Because even with an FMRI strapped to my head you're not going to get a better targetting. If you can't think of anything interesting, too bad, but there is nothing you can know about me that will make me care about something unrelated while I'm reading that article.
It really is that simple.