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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.
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
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.
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/
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 can see that point of view but completely disagree with it. A half arsed standard is worse than none at all, with a such a poorly thought out standard that advertising know the vast majority of users aren't informed enough to take advantage of they will be able to safely continue to track the majority while at the same time be able to crow about how wonderfully self regulated they are and how they don't need anyone looking into their privacy practises. It is about time this industry was cleaned up. Tracking is an unecessary evil, it should be the responsibility of the advertiser to convince the user of the value of being tracked.
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.
Advertisers ignoring DNT is bad for customers because those who are concerned about being "tracked" for advertising purposes have no way to turn off tracking.
Not everyone falls into the category of being concerned however. In fact, most people probably benefit from advertisers "tracking" them (that is, an anonymous, secure, computer determining what ads to show based upon the websites a browser has recently visited, largely to ensure that ads appear that are relevent to that person's interests.) Long before you'd turn on "do not track" you'd probably install an ad blocker anyway if you really, sincerely, do not want to be shown relevent ads.
A default DNT is bad for customers generally because it'll be ignored. It'll be ignored because if the majority of people fall into the category of benefiting from tracking, and if most advertisers lose out if tracking is not done, then advertisers will, absent some mandate, ignore it, which means those who actively don't want to be tracked, because they happen to use that machine to download their midget porn, don't get a say in the matter.
Does it make sense now?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
throwing those that lack the knowledge to protect their own privacy under the bus so those technically knowledgable enough can enjoy some protection is NOT a solution and we all should be against it. It is the responsibility of software producers to protect users whereever possible. The defaults need to be something a user can trust otherwise we are just giving everyone in IT a bad name. Firewalls should always be on, security patches should be installed, privacy should be honored. Security and Privacy should not be something a user needs to choose. Users make enough bad choices and mistakes already without us giving them a low starting point.
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.
It'll be ignored because if the majority of people fall into the category of benefiting from tracking
Since that isn't true, the rest does not follow.
For once I agree with Microsoft that WE DO NOT BENEFIT FROM TRACKING.
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.
I haven't used Windows for a few years, but from reading articles on the subject I was under the impression that the user was presented with a dialog the first time they run IE10 asking if they wish to enable the header. The advertisers' complaint seems to be more that it's easy to enable in IE10, whereas other browsers require you to hunt in menus or in settings.
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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).
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:
I disagree that Microsoft is 'undermining' DnT. They might be providing an excuse for advertizes to ignore it, but they would have done that anyway if significant numbers of people started using it.
Make no mistake, advertizes are the scummy party here. They are the ones who are intentionally ignoring a flag requesting that people not be tracked. Bashing Microsoft is almost victim blaming here.. someone else decided to be a dick because Microsoft did something that would be pro-consumer, and yet they are being blamed for someone else's actions.
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.
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.)
Nope, the dialog is presented during the Windows installation, which is done by the end-user in very few cases, since most people don't install windows themselves.
The only problem I see with MS's actions is that, according to some other posts here, the standard says that DNT must be non-default. So by making it default, they're breaking the standard. I'm all for not-tracking, but if everyone's agreed to a certain standard and that it must be implemented a certain way, then they should follow that or else try to get it changed (good luck).
Seems to me that MS could get around this by having something in Windows that pops up the first time someone starts up IE, which asks them "do you want to enable Do Not Track?", with the "No" box being checked by default, but forcing the user to click "OK" to select this, and allowing them to select the "Yes" box first if they want.
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.
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.
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
I sense a fork coming, and rightly so.