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Advertisers Blast Microsoft Over IE Default Privacy Settings
theodp writes "GeekWire reports that Microsoft is sticking to its decision to implement 'Do-Not-Track' as the default for IE 10, despite drawing the ire of corporate America, the Apache Software Foundation, and the FTC Chairman. Representatives of a veritable Who's Who of Corporate America — e.g., GM, IBM, BofA, Walmart, Merck, Allstate, AT&T, Motorola — signed off on a letter blasting Microsoft for its choice. 'By presenting Do Not Track with a default on,' the alliance argues, 'Microsoft is making the wrong choice for consumers.' The group reminds Microsoft that Apache — whose Platinum Sponsors have branded Microsoft's actions a deliberate abuse of open standards and designed its software to ignore the 'do-not-track' setting if the browser reaching it is IE 10. It also claims that the FTC Chairman, formerly supportive of Microsoft's privacy efforts, now recognizes 'the harm to consumers that Microsoft's decision could create.'"
I don't really understand what people are crying about. Microsoft has said that they will try to make IE10 better for users and this is one of the features implemented to enable that. Note that Microsoft itself owns an advertising network and is part of the advertising committee - it's that much that Microsoft wants to protect their users.
Of course, Microsoft's actions aren't new. They have always cared about privacy. Their tracking and beta debugging has always been opt-in. This in unlike Google where you often cannot even opt-out, and it's never opt-in in any case.
Microsoft simply cares about users privacy and advertisers are crying about it. Too bad for them, I say. Advertisers on TV manage to work without any tracking, it should work on the internet too.
'the harm to consumers that Microsoft's decision could create.'" The only harm is to these business' pocketbooks.. For once I'm on MS side in this matter...
I like it!
Microsoft doing something right, standing up to government and industry. The cognitive dissonance makes my brain hurt...
That the FTC sees "harm to consumers" just shows that the FTC is a revolving door for industry lobbyists. I mean, it's like putting every new number on the "do not call" list, and requiring consumers to opt-in to intrusive advertising. How horrible that would be! /sarcasm
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
What's truly disgusting here is all these companies arguing that users should have to opt in to privacy. Hopefully privacy groups and laws around privacy will come down hard on companies that try to ignore the DNT. If tracking is so critical then companies should be making their case to users why they should turn them on, if they manage to convince people well and good, but this bullshit of we will only obey the DNT if only a small group of tech savy people use it is just pathetic. It is almost understandable that companies are complaining by the apache group should be castrated for their anti privacy approach.
When you first load up IE10 just ask if the user wants to be tracked. I'm sure 90% will say "no".
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
From the ANA letter signed by companies such as General Motors Corporation, GE, IBM, and Coca-Cola:
Default policy choices should be set by looking to what is best for society as a whole ...
So, we should leave it to General Motors Corporation to decide "what is best for society as a whole?"
No, this is part of the 'Embrace, extend and extinguish' technique.
1) Embrace the do-not-track standard with MSIE.
2) Change it, so it becomes useless.
3) Continue selling advertisement and profiling users.
Coperate America loves Microsoft because they can continue doing what they want, since Microsoft gave them the excuse to ignore the do-not-track feature.
The REAL question is why would Apache default to "Do Not Track" being OFF by default??
Or are they afraid of being blasted if they did so?
It is not mandatory for advertisers to honour the "Do not track" flag. Internet users need to turn the option on themselves, or they have not expressed their desire to not be trackedthemselves, only to accept the default settings as Microsoft deems fit.
If Microsoft enable it by default, it definitely won't be honoured. If it is only set by the actions of the user, it might be honoured. Now Microsoft decides to piss in the advertiser's cornflakes and expects them to still eat them. Nice job.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Older people are the only ones that use ie, older people that advertisers do not target as much, largely because their spending habits are set, so this foe outrage seems suspicious. The only reason I can come up with as to why advertisers would publicly criticize Microsoft (please put on your tin foil hats) is that the new ie has a security hole that advertisers can use and are trying to get their target demographic to switch. Otherwise they are giving ie a boat load of good publicity that may steer people towards a product they don't want people to use.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
Advertisers: This is not the "wrong choice for consumers." It's the right choice for PEOPLE. It just happens to be negative for advertisers who have grown fat and lazy using a medium that is nearly free and mostly paid for by the 'consumers.'
Screw you all. Respect the eyes of the people using the internet. I stopped watching TV because (1) they want me to pay for it and (2) I still get my intelligence assaulted with advertisements. I pay for internet but I can control who advertises as me and I will. I don't owe you a living at my expense. Take a page out of Google's playbook -- give us some actual value and give us a reason not to block you sorry asses.
So advertisers go out there not saying what they mean, once again. Why can't they just speak the truth?! "It hurts our marketing value." Tough shit. BUILD your market and stop riding on the coat tails of other people creating their markets.
How is there opposition to this? Shouldn't "don't track me" be the default for all browsers? How is the FTC against this? Chamber of Commerce I could see... but the FTC is supposed to protect consumers, no? Personally, I think the setting should be inverted to a checkbox that says "Allow advertisers to track my online activities," with it unchecked by default, and inviting people to check it if they want. Let's see how far THAT gets. Stupid.
I guess it's like the logic that US food sellers use to prevent "country of origin" information from being included on meat and other food products. If a pack of chicken breasts was labeled "grown in China" Americans wouldn't eat it, so they leave that information out, even though it's pretty important.
In summary: profit.
rooooar
'the harm to consumers that Microsoft's decision could create.'" The only harm is to these business' pocketbooks.. For once I'm on MS side in this matter...
No, no, you see, you need to look at this from the "trickle down" aspect of economics. See, corporations are good, you need to give them a lot of money and then they in turn give that to Americans via jobs and opportunities. So the best way for them to get money is to be able to track consumers so we need to make sure that consumers can be tracked. Ideally, it would be illegal for people to own bank accounts or liquid cash and everyone would basically spend their paycheck within a few days of getting it. And they would spend it online and all the corporations would know where everyone was spending every dollar. That way, the money can work as hard as possible for society by being in corporations' pockets. And then unemployment would be really low because there would be a lot of jobs with all this extra money in corporations. Because they're undeniably good entities and they have more rights than you do because you're not supplying jobs to yourselves, the corporations are.
Why else would it be illegal for you to record every site and place your neighbor visits without their consent but be completely legal and, in fact, desired to allow a faceless corporation to do it? Duh, because we as a completely screwed up society have given the richer entities more rights than an average citizen.
My work here is dung.
I couldn't be more torn if was asked to vote AGAINST children being allowed to play outside BUT the person telling me to let the kids play outside had his pants around his ankles. And the child is a nazi.
I mean, who do I root for? The advertisers? Microsoft? IE users? People who don't know how to install ghostery and ad-block?
Can't we mandate that when forced to choose between two evils, we get another option, KILL THEM ALL!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
By taking this stand which sounds like they are on the side of privacy, but what they really want to do is stop the DNT thing all together and Apache is falling for it by modifying their code to ignore the DNT header from IE, next step will be to ignore it altogether since IE has the major browser market share.
If advertisers ignoring DNT is bad for customers, then tracking customers is bad for them.
Hence a default DNT is good for customers, but advertisers don't like it because it is bad for them.
The user community tends to be very vocal in its criticism of Microsoft on all issues, which means that Redmond sees nothing unusual about a lot of people complaining here. Like the boy who cried wolf, if you constantly complain, all complaints get equal treatment. For a company that wants to get things done and not just quit because you object, that means they all get ignored.
I am still not convinced MS isn't doing another "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". They embraced DNT, then they extended it by turning it on by default which extinguished because the industry now refuses to support it.
Mind you, this could only be true if MS was a totally evil company that does anything for a buck. Which could never be true of course for one of the most respected software and advertising companies in the world.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
despite drawing the ire of corporate America, the Apache Software Foundation
This is not about the Apache Foundation. This is Roy Fielding off his medication, insisting that Microsoft has violated the standard. The question here is whether Microsoft asks the user if the user wants DNT enabled or not. According to RF, Microsoft does not. He is wrong. They do when you install Windows 8. This has been thoroughly documented.
Sadly Fielding's patch not only circumvents the standard (so it is Apache circumventing the standard, not Microsoft), it also makes a patched Apache liable for legal action in Europe. Anyone using Apache in Europe with Fielding's patch enabled have made them selves open to legal action by any European user of that website.
Fielding is simply wrong here, he needs to admit it and his commit privileges needs to be revoked. Simple!
"You're against the industry effort to create Do Not Track standard that doesn't change the status quo.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Yet there are lots of posters on Slashdot that will tell you they trust unelected, opaque corporations more than they go the US Government, even though their grandfathers fought WW2 to destroy Fascism.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Just a thought - and I appreciate it's probably giving far too much credit to Microsoft for joined-up thinking.
But it occurs to me that Microsoft own Bing, which (like any search engine) is paid for through advertising. And if the advertising can be tightly targeted, it's possible to charge a lot more for it. It follows that at least one business unit within Microsoft wants Do Not Track to be a complete disaster.
However, the days when Microsoft could simply not bother to implement something - or implement it so badly as to make it pointless - are over. Particularly as regards web-based technologies.
So, how to deal with this? Do Not Track is based on an honour system that was only ever going to work if a relatively small percentage of people took advantage of it. By making it a default, that honour system breaks down almost immediately. I honestly can't see very many businesses even bothering to install such a function, much less enable it.
The beauty of doing it this way is it gives Microsoft the opportunity to kill Do Not Track while at the same time getting positive publicity from tech-illiterate journalists for being "the only browser to ask websites to respect your publicity by default". Win-win.
Apache's job is not to be political in this sense. They should simply implement the standard and let other people argue over how much statutory weight it should have.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
In the last 20 years Advertisers have been creeping further and further into our lives and we (the average citizen) have had little to no say in the matter, but now we are finally putting our foot down and declaring "No More". Ad Agencies are upset because of the loss to their cash intake, as well as they are like spoiled children who are being told "NO". They don't like it. The image that comes to mind is the picture of mom saying to her child, "no cookies", and the child stomps, pouts, cries, and has tantrums, and when none of that works, they devise a way to climb up to that upper cabinet to get the cookie jar.
It's time to get rid of all the cookies from the house so there is no demand for the cookie that doesn't exist.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
slashdot prejudice asplodes
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This article is severely misleading. The supposed complaints about open web standards violations don't come from Apache Platinum Sponsors, of which one is Microsoft who is obviously _not_ complaining, and you can look at the list and decide for yourself which one's might worry about user's privacy and which one's wouldn't. The complaint is just some mail thread of Apache developers having a moan, where some of them think apparently that privacy settings shouldn't be set by default but should set knowingly by the user (and others vehemently say that this argument is nonsense). And they are _not_ complaining that "don't track" is the default, but that there is a default. And they are not complaining to Microsoft, this is just an Apache internal discussion.
It gives me a warm, pink, fuzzy feeling knowing that corporate America is looking out for my best interests.
Actually it is, advertising is all about targeting where people go and luring them to go else where.
And by preventing them from being able to track this information about you, they won't know not to bother.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Lets say that in the future there is a call to put into law that this DNT flag is honoured by advertisers. A bill will be put to congress that states If advertisers do not respect the DNT flag, they will be committing a crime.
However, passing this law would run into problems, because Internet Explorer is defaulting the flag to true! Advertisers would quite rightly claim that the DNT flag is not a true indicator of what internet users want. The bill would be thrown out..... DNT will die. This is what Microsoft are doing. By setting the flag on by default, they are killing the standard, for what ever reason. It will hurt consumers, because setting DNT on or off in any browser wont make any difference what so ever.
They say this is a good think, and on the surface it looks great. Protecting the privacy of their users. In reality, its fucking up the privacy of the entire internet in a similar way that non-standard IE6 fucked up the usability of the entire internet a few years back.
The 'bad for consumers' argument goes like this: when reducing the value in online advertising, one reduces the revenues of all the free services we enjoy on the Internet. Therefore there will be fewer free services available. I don't buy it. The losers always howl when changes in the marketplace reduce their revenue. The world continues, and the Internet will too. I won't miss CNET.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
I understand your conspiracy post and, who knows, perhaps that's even the case.
However, intentionally derailing DNT is good for users regardless.
Even the most vehement defenders of DNT who lambast IE10's default in comments here suggest that it 'advertisers might' respect it, that it's based on an 'honor' system, and that its entire premise is based on 'not too many people enabling it'.
Advertisers might. Honor. Not too many people.
That should sound like "never going to work" to even the most clueless of people.
Better it get derailed now and exposed for what it is so that users don't falsely assume that just because they have DNT set that advertisers are going to respect it, than that it gets ingrained in common use and with parties left and right ignoring it because at some point 'too many' people have it set while still suggesting to privacy groups, government, etc. that DNT works wonderfully and no new legislation would be required.
If certain parties are sufficiently concerned about tracking, then perhaps making browsers not leak so much information would be a good first step. Offer a proxy/VPN service as a second step. After that, you're at the mercy of sites respecting what info you willfully send them, and last I checked there tends to be laws governing that already (despite loopholes abound making those laws mostly pointless).
I can't believe how many of you can't figure out why this is BAD for consumers for Microsoft to be setting DNT by default. Let's think a little! Before Microsoft implemented this "bad" advertisers ignored the DNT so they're going to track you no matter what. "good" advertisers honored the flag assuming that if you were smart enough to turn it on then that means you must really not want to be tracked. Now if Microsoft turns it on by default the "bad" advertisers are still going to track you because they ignore it. The "good" advertisers if they still follow it will see a huge revenue loss because most folks don't care really. Congratulations now no one is going to be a "good" advertiser and DNT will be ignored. Also as a smart consumer you've also now lost that option to opt out because someone broke the system for you. All the companies that are complaining well guess what, I'll bet they honour DNT.
Also advertising is not necessarily evil. National Geographic for example has more advertising in it than they did historically but they've also kept subscription fees exactly the same for years. Personally I would prefer to pay more for less ads but I can understand how to a lot of subscribers they'd prefer to pay less and see a few more ads. I think the Internet is the same. Would you prefer to pay more? Probably not so ads it be.
What Microsoft's retort should be:
"Well if you don't honor it, then we'll just bundle AdBlock."
Good for the consumers and bad for competition, namely Google.
Since folks have to actually change a setting to enable tracking then it solves a serious problem.
With DNT = Disabled by default you could possibly forget to set it to Enabled and then go surfing.
You visit several sites (and they track you AND RECORD DNT = DISABLED) if you later Enable DNT then if they don't even look how is that handled??
1 They get a "pass" and can track you wherever (oh btw they are part of a network so several hundred sites are now tracking you)
2 they have to destroy the existing data and stop tracking you
3 they just stop tracking you and keep the data
If i was an ad network operator i would try to get built a virus/worm/whatever that targets the browser settings and scrambles them (forcing a reset from factory).
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Close, but not far enough. The economy would benefit even more if you didn't even get the dollars in the first place. Instead, you get credit that can be used to buy products from your employer and their official partners.
This way the company keeps all the dollars, and can use them to improve their products and services without having to show a labor cost on the balance sheet. Usage of the credits is easily tracked by the employer and partners, and the black market for drugs, hookers, gambling, or anything else that requires cash is exterminated. Everybody wins!
file:
Microsoft's ad revenue pales in comparison to its competitor's ad revenue. This is more like Europeans carrying small pox coming to the Americas in the 1500's: It causes them to suffer some uncomfortable days, but it decimates the opposition. While the decision can certainly be seen in a good light for consumers, I think this action is directly related to how Google gets most of their revenue: precise targeted advertising.
Except that it doesn't. DNT doesn't make people not track you, it asks them to. It says that you've made an affirmative, non-default choice to opt-out of tracking, and the people who actually do tracking are only going to listen to it if they don't think that it's a lie. To quote Roy Fielding -- one of the authors of the DNT standard:
The fairly broad consensus, which includes lots of advertisers, on supporting and respecting DNT was around it being used the way the DNT standard says it would be -- for the user agent to communicate to a server that the user has made an affirmative, non-default choice to opt-out of tracking. IE10 DNT by default makes it quite likely that DNT adoption on the server side -- something that Microsoft hasn't done on their own sites and has announced no plans to ever do -- won't be as good as it would have been without that decision, and even moreso makes it likely that even those sites that support the DNT flag in general will ignore it when it comes from IE10 since IE10 is overtly not using it to communicate the information that it is intended to communicate and which forms the basis for respecting it.
And see all those people raising their hands? Those are the people that IE10's DNT deception doesn't hurt. DNT-by-default doesn't mean that advertisers won't track you. It means that advertisers that wouldn't have tracked you if IE10 didn't do that and you chose to use DNT will track you.
So this also says that Apache will ignore the Do-Not-Track flag if the browser is Internet Explorer 10. I understand the argument that setting DNT:on without the explicit user consent is questionable, though that's really what 90% of the users want anyway. But how is ignoring the DNT flag of all IE 10 users without knowing whether it was set manually or not any better?
Something feels very wrong when an open-source project sides not with the general population but with big corporations out to invade their privacy in any way they can.
Have you actually tried doing any research, or are you just assuming that consumers don't want to be tracked?
Ask 50 people, "Would you prefer to see ads which advertisers had determined were more-likely to be of interest to you, instead of a random selection of ads?", and report back.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
If you think we don't benefit from tracking, then you probably want a browser that people who have agreed to respect that decision on the part of the users will listen to when it says that the user has affirmatively chosen to opt-out of tracking (which is what the DNT flag is defined to mean in the standard, a standard for which Microsoft is on the workgroup and has not requested that the meaning be changed). Since Microsoft has announced that IE10 will lie about whether the user has made that decision (sending a "1" which means an affirmative choice has been made to opt-out, rather than a null which is correct for no choice), even many of the people that will take action based on the DNT flag in the general case will ignore it when it comes from IE10.
What Microsoft has done is not consistent with the idea that they are trying to serve the interests of consumers and think that tracking is harmful.
(It would be consistent with the idea that they think that tracking -- or at least tracking without user choice -- is harmful and are deliberately trying to harm consumers.)
And Microsoft is a very strategy oriented company. They have bent over backwards in the past to make their products business friendly. So, why would they be willing to take heat from a sector of the business community on this Do Not Track option with regards to IE 10? Is it because they are fighting the good fight for the consumers as some are led to believe or could it be that Microsoft sees this as a method to limit additional add revenues to some of its largest competitors? I have to believe that Google and Facebook are both researching and attempting to extend their own advert revenues by pushing further into specific targeted adverts for consumers. If Microsoft had a method in their possession to make that effort more difficult for their competitors, do you think they would use it? I can't say for sure this is the motivation but most companies generally will not take an arbitrary stance on an issue unless they feel it is somehow worth the blow back and controversy it generates.
Thanks Roy, you made things much easier!
Now I know that I need to use full ad blocking on any site running Apache.
Sorry about the complete revenue loss instead of just a minor hit for not tracking, but I guess it's important for you to maintain your integrity, you know, by ignoring my wishes.
It makes sense to codify a standard for expressing the choice; it makes less sense to impose a default setting for the choice. However, if Microsoft is a signatory to a standard demanding such a default, they would seem beholden to adhere to it. If they are not a signatory, or perhaps if they became a signatory with a stated objection to the default, they would seem within their rights to assign their own default based on their interpretation of customer benefit.
I remember, not that many years ago...before there was advertising on web pages and the internet in general.
You know what? It wasn't a bad thing...didn't bother me at all that I didn't have ads, or that I was being tracked.
Nope...didn't miss it at all....
Remember, the Internet and the Web...weren't originally designed to be commercial vehicles....and worked just fine before those came along later.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Or more realistic,, rather than your spin-doctor question: Do you want websites tracking you so that they know what other sites you visit so they can server you ads they think are relevant based on their spying on you?
Even if ignoring DNT for all IE10 users is done, it should be done at the application level by individual site owners, not at the web server or TCP/IP level. Apache is doing a power grab here.
This space for rent.
Microsoft should get back at Apache by enabling the DNT flag for all browsers for sites hosted on IIS!
It's ridiculous that Apache is blocking DNT flags. Web servers should be just that, web servers, not vehicles for egomaniacs.
This space for rent.
I'd be willing to guess that the majority of that 50 would respond with "I'd prefer to see no ads at all".....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I wonder if people keep forgetting this?
advertising is shoving your ideas in front of peoples' faces and hoping they agree with you.
tracking is much, much worse. and usually, people have no idea they are being SPIED on. yes, tracking == spying. lets call a spade a spade, shall we?
I can understand that advertisers want to shove ads in our faces.
I cannot understand why they think they have a RIGHT to follow us everywhere.
corporate stalking is more apt as a definition. maybe we should start calling it that, as a way of reminding people how evil this concept is.
'targeted ads' is also bullshit. anyone who thinks this concept is acceptable should have their heads examined.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
embrace, extend, extinguish
the comments about bing are correct in that microsoft expects people to pay for advertisements through its acquired Yahoo search product. do not track is in direct opposition to this and if codified as a real standard would pose a real threat. so what do we do? we embrace it as a good idea for customers and extend it such that its on all the time, by default, thus rendering the original consumer "choice" in the matter a moot point. The state of tracking your browser habits is now rendered entirely irrelevant, advertisers have even more incentive to ignore the option, and the idea of tracking dies a silent death through manufactured, intentional backlash. Apache ignoring the DnT flag, or any other project for that matter, was a possibility microsoft probably foresaw. it still works out in their favour by fracturing the standard. Apache is fighting for a standard that died the minute microsoft decided they wanted to be part of it, but thats okay.
the only fix is to accept cookies from sites you trust, and reject all others. youll find there are really only a handful of sites (in my case 7) that need to generate and store a cookie. make it auto-expire at the end of the session. Install Noscript and forget the do not track mess entirely, because you enforce the content on your own terms.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Corporatist are not entitled to stalk people...get over it advertisers. Choke on your greed and DIAF.
This strange comment at the bottom of the message is illogical.
It's as simple as this: Microsoft is intentionally breaking the standard, which will lead to it being ignored by everyone. I'm not sure why so many people believe MS is doing the right thing here.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
Ignoring the DNT is a clear violation of the Consent clause of the European Union Data Protection Directive.
I'm pretty shocked that Apache should go along with this decision by folding in face of commercial interests.
If I had any mod points, I'd have modded you Insightful for that. I was wondering myself why Apache itself should care about the header at all, since DNT should not affect the server's access or error logging. Unless the Apache developers intend to track every visitor by default, of course, in which case I can see nginx and the like becoming popular on scaling grounds...
Someone should tell everyone in that list that web advertising doesn't work. That does sort of invalidate the entire thing.
"Microsoft sees the default setting in part as a competitive advantage in its appeal to get users to try Internet Explorer "
And for me, it will work.
and Apaches override default settings? WTF Apache?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Or phrase the question differently -
Would you like unmonitored strangers sitting in an office in {foreign_country} to know that you enjoy {product} so that they can aggregate you with other users of {product} and attempt to sell you related products?
How about this novel idea: ALL advertising should be opt-in by default.
I know, without advertising the advertising industry would die. Meh.
You can have it fast, accurate, or pretty. Pick any 2.
though that's really what 90% of the users want anyway.
Citation needed?
If you tell users, "click this checkbox to prevent people from tracking your behavior online!", yes, most users would click that checkbox. Unfortunately that promise would be a lie, because this standard doesn't prevent anything of the sort. It may affect the behavior of some advertisers (not everyone that "tracks" behavior online), at the expense of ad relevancy. (Yes, some people do click on advertisements because they actually find the ads useful.)
Make it an informed choice, and the number of users that enable it will be less than 90%, and advertisers would have an unambiguous signal about the user's intent and no reason to not honor it.
Who do you think pays the salaries over at the Apache Foundation?
"His name was James Damore."
it's backwards day on /.
Seriously, people blaming MS because they actual implement something users want. Going on as if the advertising companies and people who want to track you are some kink of hero against the oppression of people not wanting to be tracked.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
And this on the first thing in pretty much forever where I honestly think MS is doing the right thing.
Of course, it is mostly because they realize that advertisement is the #1 sector where they can hurt Google, but still, motivation aside, it is absolutely the right thing to do. Everywhere else when it comes to unsolicited advertisement - aka spam - we demand opt-in. Now that opt-in has become possible for the web, quite frankly, if you don't embrace it you are a fool, an idiot, a sell-out or all three.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
How can one seriously suggest that a privacy/security option should be set to "open" by default? This is against everything we've learntt since the first computers were networked together. Just because it hurts your business model doesn't mean it is a bad idea. Just like spam filters are a good idea even if I make my money off it.
I sense a fork coming, and rightly so.
though that's really what 90% of the users want anyway.
Citation needed?
I'll bite. So according to a study, 73% users said they were against tracking by the search engines, and 68% were against targeted advertising.
So it's not as high as 90%. But still, what's best? Respecting DNT for IE 10 users and thus doing what 70%(*) of users want or ignoring it and only satisfying the wishes of 28%(**) of the users?
If you tell users, "click this checkbox to prevent people from tracking your behavior online!", yes, most users would click that checkbox. Unfortunately that promise would be a lie
Nobody said anything about wording it that way and that not how it's worded in IE's dialogs. So I'm not sure where you're getting at with you 'lying' insinuations.
Make it an informed choice, and the number of users that enable it will be less than 90%, and advertisers would have an unambiguous signal about the user's intent and no reason to not honor it.
Bullshit! I'm on a national Do-Not-Call phone registry. You cannot get on the list without explicitly asking for it. Does it mean I never get telemarketing calls? No. Does it mean telemarketers remove me from their list when I tell them not to call me again? No. Instead they hang up in my face and call again a few days later!
IE 10 is just the advertisers' latest excuse to continue doing whatever they want.
(*) I'm starting with the 'targeted ads' numbers which are more favorable to your point of view. The survey shows 28% of the users want them and 68% oppose it. Furthermore a separate study shows that, when they have to manually hunt and set DNT, 5 to 6% of the overall population turns it on. Given that we know 68% favor DNT that means 7 to 9% of the users will go through the hassle. So if DNT is on by default on IE 10 we can expect 7 to 9% of the I-want-targeted-ads crowd to turn it back off which translates to 2 to 2.5%. So if DNT is honored for IE 10 these 2 to 2.5% users will get what they want as well as the 68% who are fine with the default setting, yielding a total of 70 to 70.5% users getting what they want.
(**) Or, conversely, going against the wishes of 68% of the users (the remaining 4% don't know what they want).
I tested it on my website I run statcounter widget to gather stats tracking where users came from to get to my site, what page they are on the longest, exit links, repeat visitors, etc.
I used my laptop IE9, Firefox, Chrome, Safari all ones I could set do not track on at least by default or with a plugin.
Then went to my website via google, via a friends page, direct to my website, and clicked an exit link.
on all browsers, went to statcounter stats on my main desktop and even though all browsers were set do not track, they were all tracked which link they each clicked to get to my site, which exit links clicked, how long thtey stayed, and full browser/resolution/screen size info.
do not track is a joke
Hmm ... looks like it got partially reverted. The configuration change is present but commented out: https://github.com/apache/httpd/commit/3dd6fb6882ae2b453c90d51e777e88bc420a0cb1.
...just from tracking us. It should be illegal to track someone without their permission.
I strongly agree. Something smells VERY fishy here.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
To True! I currently run sever servers, about a third on Apache, a third on Tomcat and a third on IIS. I am moving all my pure Apache servers over to IIS immediately in response to Apache's anouncement of not supporting the flag from IE users. I will probably move my Tomcat servers over as well at some point.
Who are they to tell me I must ignore do-not-track if it's coming from a particular browser? What if I *want* to honor do-not-track from IE10?
It should be possible to knock up a Greasemonkey script to detect Apache and add it to a block list.
Microsoft gave them the excuse to ignore the do-not-track feature.
As implemented in Microsoft's products.
"My excuse for ignoring DNT in every web browser is because one browser nobody cares about doesn't follow the standard."
Uh, what?
In the 19th century when you worked for the steel mill, the mine or maybe the rail car manufacturer, you probably lived in the company town. In housing owned by the company. And you shopped at stores owned by the company. Since you did all your business with the company, you got paid in company scrip. And chances are you didn't make quite enough to make ends meet, so you went into debt, which they deducted from your paycheck.
It's a little hard to argue what Fascist economics looks like; the only two working examples of a Fascist government were Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany. Both parties started out at least nominally socialist ("Nazi" is a rough shortening of the full German name of the party, the National Socialist German Worker's Party"), but it's not really clear whether this was *just* a pose to undermine other left-wing parties prior to Nazi ascendance or whether it actually was a meaningful aspect of Nazi ideology. At least early on there were a number of economic initiatives (The VW and some other consumer products) oriented towards German workers.
It's also important to recognize that business was facing some pretty stark choices as well -- it wasn't a given that Germany or Italy wouldn't have gone Soviet-style communist or at least radically socialist. For the moneyed business class, joining up with the Fascists in an uncertain time was less about philosophy than finding the guy who wasn't completely about taking away your business and stripping you of your wealth.
Regardless, though, both countries had power-hungry leaders who wanted their countries on war footing and put them into major wars fairly soon after taking power. It's really hard to know what Germany or Italy would have been like economically with Fascist governments over a longer period, especially Germany. To this day there is a lot of cooperation between German unions, businesses and the government.
Microsoft should change IE 10 so that when the server-header indicates Apache, IE sets the User-Agent to Firefox.
...the biggest recommendation for IE 10 I have yet heard.
DNT won't work if it is the default... Apache is trying to save DNT
People calling ASF evil bewilders me, they are a non-profit organization. I've never understood what the big deal is with tracking cookies. People act like a tracking cookie is a virus when it's pretty harmless by itself. They are a part of how browsers work, we all know this.
If you think MS is doing something that will help the Internet with this decision I think you are not seeing the big picture. ASF's actions show a clear understanding of how things need to go down if we actually want DNT to be implemented in a way that actually works
'Microsoft is making the wrong choice for consumers.'
They're already doing this by releasing Windows 8.
What a minute. Shouldn't we be putting the blame on Apache? By deliberately ignore the DNT flag on IE 10, they are breaking an essential trust and screwing users.
This is a great standard. It makes me willing to try IE 10, and I am not one who generally uses Microsoft software.
This is my first post on slashdot, so please forgive me. I am an insane man who believes he can see hidden messages that 'they don't want you to know.' From: Advertising_Campaign@Microsoft.com To: Joe_Confederate@Apache.com Hello again Joe. We at Microsift would like to thank you for giving us your business and want to make sure our important information filters through to you. We have initiated a new default policy for the browser you are currently using. The general public who newly install our browser, thanks to our amazingly saturated, well funded advertising campaign, will now block the resources your business depends on. Also Joe, since we share the same interests, I want to encourage you to discuss this with the rest of your coworkers. Please send us this information so we may better improve our services. We highly value your input. Thanks! Bass Ackwards, Advertising_Campaign@Microsoft.com, 1-800-tihs-lub
If MS starts thinking about the user, they may change the Win8 UI settings to allow users to turn the tile interface off. OH NO!
There was an unknown error in the submission.
... for Microsoft?
I jhink i bust troke my bain. 0_o
THINK! It's patriotic
So it's not as high as 90%. But still, what's best? Respecting DNT for IE 10 users and thus doing what 70%(*) of users want or ignoring it and only satisfying the wishes of 28%(**) of the users?
I'd like to see a similar poll asking if people would prefer to pay for things, or get more things for free. Because I sort of see a similarity, what with the trading one thing of value in exchange for something else of value. I'm betting those 68% still participate in this exchange, DNT or no.
If you tell users, "click this checkbox to prevent people from tracking your behavior online!", yes, most users would click that checkbox. Unfortunately that promise would be a lie
Nobody said anything about wording it that way and that not how it's worded in IE's dialogs. So I'm not sure where you're getting at with you 'lying' insinuations.
Sorry, you're right. The actual text, according to your link, is:
Send a Do Not Track request to websites you visit in Internet Explorer
While this is strictly technically accurate, it does imply that this actually does something, that web sites will honor it, and makes no statements about the costs (in terms of ad relevancy). That was the point I was making: it's kind of misleading, and those that do get value out of advertising will get less value out of it without realizing it, while believing that their privacy has improved despite the fact that it probably hasn't.
Bullshit! I'm on a national Do-Not-Call phone registry. You cannot get on the list without explicitly asking for it. Does it mean I never get telemarketing calls? No. Does it mean telemarketers remove me from their list when I tell them not to call me again? No. Instead they hang up in my face and call again a few days later!
I completely agree. DNT, even assuming it were widely honored, doesn't prevent people or governments from doing the "tracking" that people clicking the checkbox don't want. But DNT is going to be less widely honored if advertisers don't feel that the choice is fair to them (fully informed, etc). So if you set DNT on by default, and advertisers decide they're not going to honor it that way, it gets honored for no one. I.e., net privacy loss.