Slashdot Mirror
An Overview of the Do Not Track Debate
jonathanmayer writes "The Verge is carrying an accurate and accessible overview of the Do Not Track debate. Quoting: 'With the fate of our beloved internet economy allegedly at stake, perhaps it's a good time to examine what Do Not Track is. How did the standard come to be, what does it do, and how does it stand to change online advertising? Is it as innocuous as privacy advocates make it sound, or does it stand to jeopardize the free, ad-supported internet we've all come to rely on?' The issues surrounding Do Not Track can be difficult to understand, owing to rampant rhetoric and spin. This article unpacks the tracking technology, privacy concerns, economic questions, and political outlook. Full disclosure: I'm quoted."
you want me to read about privacy on a website with no less than 4 web bugs and tracking code up the wazoo, not to mention all their shitty adverts
get off my web
As I remember it, things were expanding quite quickly even before every little click was tracked. I imagine things might slow down with Do-Not-Track, but they will keep growing.
Save early, Save often
DNT is useless. You WILL be tracked if you give sites information that is useful in tracking you. The very best you can do is chase the tracking out of your legal jurisdiction and into other countries or underground.
The only effective way to stop tracking is client side. It's like the analog of MMPORG games, where the client cannot be trusted, because it must be assumed to be in malicious hands. Here, the server cannot be trusted not to track you, because it must be assumed to be in malicious hands.
DNT is actively harmful, because it makes tech-illiterates think that if they set it in their browser, they will not be tracked. We have already seen that is not the case.
Who cares? Adblock; Ghostery; RandomUserAgent; and always, always, ALWAYS lie when asked for things like your DOB or zip code.
Have fun fulling your DB with useless crap trying to "track" me, Marketers.
Team Marketing is on tactical thermonuclear crack. I don't know where the hell they got it; but damn if it isn't the good stuff. Consider the below, from a 'Rachel Thomas' working on behalf of the "Direct Marketing Association":
"Marketing fuels the world. It is as American as apple pie and delivers relevant advertising to consumers about products they will be interested at a time they are interested. DNT should permit it as one of the most important values of civil society. Its byproduct also furthers democracy, free speech, and – most importantly in these times – JOBS. It is as critical to society – and the economy – as fraud prevention and IP protection and should be treated the same way.
Marketing as a permitted use would allow the use of the data to send relevant offers to consumers through specific devices they have used. The data could not be used for other purposes, such as eligibility for employment, insurance, etc. Thus, we move to a harm consideration. Ads and offers are just offers – users/consumers can simply not respond to those offers – there is no associated harm.
Further, DNT can stop all unnecessary uses of data using choice and for those consumers who do not want relevant marketing the can use the persistent Digital Advertising Alliance choice mechanism. This mechanism has been in place for 2 years."
Yes, she actually said that. In public.
Has got you covered... some what:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firegloves/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/betterprivacy/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/
Is it just me who's thought it f'in hilarious to be on a friends computer hit a website and get porn based ads & pop-ups? :)
If the economy depends on private corporations analyzing the behaviors of citizens, fuck the economy. Seriously, people will still buy the things they need without having ads thrown in their faces every 2 seconds.
The thing that pisses me off the most about most (even supposedly reputable) web sites these days, is the eye opener you get if you run NoScript. The fact that the home pages of supposedly reputable sites are trying to pull in javascript from like a dozen or more unrelated sites is just fucking inexcusable, and it seems to get worse every day.
Worse yet is that some of those simply don't work at all unless you resort to "Temporarily allow all from this page", in which case I tend to just bail and never go back. I mean seriously...WTF??? I can't tell you how that burns my ass.
I haven't read about the full spec of DNT, but in Piwik I am provided with only the option of not tracking people who are requesting not to be tracked, and the instructions around that particular option (within the GUI) state that it should be left checked. But I disagree with this. My website is my private property, and I should be allowed to track what users do so that I can make my site perform better for my users. This is why I feel there should be options in DNT, which I also don't see in my FF browser options. Options would be something like:
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
Just taken the EFF test.
With JS enabled: 1 in 2 500 000 browsers have a similar configuration :(
With JS disabled: 1 in 70 000 :)
Thank you, NoScript ;) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noscript/
It adds another bit to your browser fingerprint and so, together with IP, user agent string, Accept: headers etc., makes it just a little easier to track you even in absence of cookies.
Summary: Advertisers are assholes and do not give a fuck about what you want.
Did I miss anything?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
The issues surrounding Do Not Track can be difficult to understand, owing to rampant rhetoric and spin.
Not for me.
A few minutes of quiet reflection and the liberal application of common sense will result in the following:
(1) DNT=1 needs to be set by the user to be useful. It doesn't make sense for the browser distributor to set it, because he's not the guy who's actually using it.
(2) Of course, there needs to be a default setting for DNT if the user hasn't specified it yet. If it defaults to DNT=1, then that's tantamount to a small handful of guys who create browsers for a living, in unison, giving the finger to the advertising industry. Common sense says that the advertising industry will be uninterested in that, and will have no reason to respect DNT. So DNT=0 is the only default that's practicable.
(3) To educate people about the fact that DNT is now available, there probably needs to be a popup during the first-time launch that asks the user what he wants his DNT flag to be. I'm not comfortable with that conclusion, because I hate it when software asks me about shit I don't care about. But this is the first issue since the birth of the browser that's probably important enough to warrant a popup, and it might very well be the last.
(4) No matter what DNT flag is sent, there will be a bunch of advertisers who don't give a fuck about it. And there will be another big bunch of advertisers who will (either deliberately or not) misinterpret what it means. What exactly does "track" mean, anyway? Expect the interpretation of that word to get bent and twisted like crazy as this gets rolled out.
(5) If enough advertisers don't respect it, or if enough of them misunderstand what "track" means, then the whole scheme will collapse, and DNT won't mean dick. Given the fact that there's no real downside to ignoring DNT, I would bet a nice sum of money that DNT will end up being a total joke, when all is said and done.
I'm not a friggin' genius. Pretty much anyone can figure this out if they just reflect on it a bit. The above conclusions are exactly what I predicted when I first heard about DNT a long time ago. Nothing I've read has changed my conclusions one bit.
It's much shorter. :-)
Your post advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting tracking. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
(x) Dude, fucking seriously. A checkbox to say "Hi marketers, please don't track me!"? What are you, on crack? You've got better odds walking through a bad neighborhood wearing gold chains and a "Please don't mug me" shirt.
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I remember the internet before all you scumbag advertisers showed up.
There is a psychological phenomenon which shows past events in better light. First, the internet without advertisements never existed. There were ads on Arpanet. Second, you would feel less nostalgy for the internet of the eighties or nineies if you actually have to use that nowdays.
Do not track is a farce that relies on the good will of corporations acting against their own interests.
I'd far rather internet users smarten up and be careful what they do online.
The information isn't under the user's control anyhow, so I'd rather that fact be transparently known and precautions taken, rather than have gullible users live in some magical fairy world where they pretend they are safe.
That would be stupid, yes. But I think the point of DNT isn't that. It's to allow the user to express their desire.
The current default is that it's acceptable to track users. To begin to eliminate tracking you have to give users a voice, the ability to declare that they don't want to be tracked. That's what DNT is. The next step is enforcement.
The article is based on the assumption that the total ad revenue of the industry would not be significantly less even if they have to show random ads to everybody again. The author thinks that the ad budgets does not really change, only they are spent on different methods. I have my experience which contradicts this assumption. We had a paid product and tested Google Adwords. The result was not good enough. We only managed to have a zero balance: the money we spent on ad was about the same as the additional revenue we got. At the end we have not started a real campaign. If the effectiveness of the ads were only a bit better, than obviously we were able to allocate a significant amount of money. So no, the assumption is not valid, the ad budgets does depend and may hugely depend on the effectiveness of the ad systems.
I would be interested in seeing actual transfer amount statistics, breaking down the traffic through a major backbone provider.
Exactly what percentage of internet traffic is "service", and what percentage is "advertisment related"?
(EG, what prcentage of the data transfered in a 24 hour polling period is explicitly advertisement related, vs all other uses.)
I have see some very data hungry adverts. Flash based ads especially. (Blizzard, I am looking at you. Movie studios, you too!) Give that those can easily be 900kb+ each, just how much of their hosting bill is actually being levied for serving the adverts they claim they need to serve, to pay for their hosting bill?
Would an ad-starved internet actually have cleaner pipes?
Last time I checked most traffic came from Netflix and YouTube. Btw. ads are hosted by the ad companies - at least for now, until there are only a few percent of visitors who block ads. If ad-blockers become a significant loss for web sites they will have to start mixing ads with their own content.
I mean..
I realize network neutrality is the defacro norm (at least for the time being), but let's say backbone provider A has a peering agreement with downstream provider B, and advertising company C.
Downstream B gets lots of traffic through their pipe from advert company B, pumped into the through backbone connction A.
The adverts have to traverse intermediate networks to reach the "recipient".
That same 900kb of data takes bandwidth on many networks, and is not exactly free to transmit.
What I was asking, is if the amount of traffic sent by advertisers through downstream networks could be considered abusive. (Eg, what percentage of traffic is unsolicited advertisements lobbed at users, just for trying to use a web service, especially compared to the amount of data that web service would consume all by itself.)
Also, in addition to the actual advert itself, if we also factored in all the inter-server communication between advertising companies as well, (eg, slashdot sends a request to the advert company server [via the user], telling the advert where the advert was displayed for payment processing, which then sends a random advert, as well as the cross-hosted script requests, and added http get requests for said files that would not have been generated without the need to serve the advert.), all those nickles and dimes surely add up?
After the W3C's recent face-to-face meeting in Amsterdam, the the Digital Advertising Alliance plainly said that it "does not require companies to honor DNT," effectively saying it intends to stick to its own self-regulatory approach to user privacy.[
That's okay, Digital Advertising Alliance, because I didn't expect anyone to honor such a less-than-worthless piece of shit that is embarrassingly considered a standard. Fuck, even Apache only honors it purely at their own discretion and completely disregards certain OS and browser configurations. However, I bought and own my own computers, and they will obey their master and honor my rights and privacy that you disregard. I have my own little "self-regulatory approach" already implemented for you, no need for you to waste your time and money creating your own. It consists of such things as the disabling of all third-party cookies, the total blocking of all of your ads with AdBlock Plus and the Element Hiding Helper, the blocking of JavaScript and Flash on all sites that I do not approve of with NoScript, and Do Not Track Plus or Ghostery to further protect myself from you.
... at how some people (particularly in certain industries) manage to make non-issues into issues.
Legislate "Do Not Track". Period. Done. End of story, end of problems. Those who make their living from tracking the comings and goings of other, innocent and unknowing people, can go suck eggs. I have no sympathy.
None.