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Yahoo Will Ignore IE 10's "Do Not Track"
dsinc writes "And so it begins... Yahoo has made it official: it won't honor the Do Not Track request issued by Internet Explorer 10. Their justification? '[T]he DNT signal from IE10 doesn't express user intent" and "DNT can be easily abused.'" Wonder what percentage of users would rather be tracked by default.
See now, the trouble here is that all of these privacy settings rely on corporate "good will", when there is no such thing.
Really, the only way to ensure your privacy is extreme paranoia. Sorry.
Even Apache doesn't honor DNT if it has been issued by IE10
http://www.pcworld.com/article/262150/apache_web_servers_will_ignore_ie10s_do_not_track_settings.html
Is it really a surprise that a failing business like Yahoo! would ignore its users in an attempt to make money?
Look, the obvious lesson here is that no business can be trusted to keep secrets. Also: Water is wet, fire is hot. Don't give out anything you don't want to get out there, no matter what some PHB promises you.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Yahoo leads the way forward, whether it is in their innovative email platform with intuitive ui (ads), their reporting (entertainming/advertising) with an insightful comments from the community (tea partying racists), or their home page that I haven't visited but I hear has relevant content (ads) - Yahoo is the future. We can't expect anything less than a rejection of IE's fascist desire to make advertising less lucrative. After all, users want nothing more than for the advertising they see to be as intrusive and lucrative for companies as possible.
They should have made a huge startup dialog "Do you want to be tracked" and achieved 90+% block without these complaints. They might still have ignored it but at least it would have been clearly a DNT violation
What browser makers really need to do to prevent tracking is to simply clear cookies when you close your browser. For good measure also clear flash and silverlight cookies. That prevents persistent tracking. It works perfectly for me. I've never needed do not track.
How do you know they aren't tracking you by IP address and habit of sites you visit?
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
And I definitely won't use them now. They can rot.
Now I know to do full ad and cookie blocking for yahoo sites.
Thanks Yahoo, you made my decision easier.
Why should the rule not be that, absent my express permission for them to track my comings and goings, they do not have permission?
Basically, it should be, this is common sense. The problem now is for those in the advertising industry whose business model has been based on the ability to deceptively trick the majority of users into not realizing just how badly they're being tracked online and how broadly their info is being sold etc.
I think if your business model is based on tricking people into doing something that they would reject if they fully knew and understood what you were doing, then you are doing something wrong.
That said, I think the claims that the industry would just die without the ability to track users are overblown. I think the effectiveness of personalized advertising is exaggerated, as well as the perceived value in compiling detailed user profiles with full web histories. The reason is that targeted advertising doesn't really increase the number of dollars available to chase after goods. Example: you don't really suddenly decide to buy a motorcycle because of a targeted advert ... in most cases you probably decided you wanted a motorcycle first, and then you probably anyway ignored most the adverts in order to do some more solidly grounded market research, e.g. looking at the specs of the bikes, getting some advice from friends or online forums, and looking at what motorcycles actually appeal to you. A targeted ad in that case might make you statistically very slightly more likely to favor another brand .... but for most people the decision will be based mostly on things like advice from friends, comparison of specs, and test rides. And after you buy the motorcycle, those dollars are basically no longer available to spend on all the other crap being advertised online to you.
If targeted advertising based on tracking your data etc. was as useful as has been claimed, Facebook would have made a killing from it, but instead it was a flop, and they have now desperately resorted to just making companies pay for 'sponsored posts' now instead to dump the crap in your feed.
What's even more shocking is that there's people still using Yahoo.
When working on any neophytes or old persons computer Yahoo is there under IE with the default homepage 80% of the time. Reason being is the crapware that OEMs install as well as ISP software both reset the users homepage too it for $$$ cash back.
Ones with MSN as the default page are typically corporate users. If MS decided not to be retarded and capture the market from Google they would put it in the Windows contract to not change the homepage at the OEM level. ... anyway I can see why Yahoo would be threatened by this as smart users like us who go to sites like slashdot use an alternative browser. Or if we do use IE we change the homepage to Google or something similar. Yahoo is the oldschool portal that regular people use who are not into computers very reminiscent of AOL back in the day 10 years earlier.
http://saveie6.com/
AOL is still around, somehow, though I have no fucking clue how.
Lies! I haven't received any free coasters from them for years now.
Why should the rule not be that, absent my express permission for them to track my comings and goings, they do not have permission?
Why should the rule be that the information you explicitly (or unknowingly) divulge through your web browser in the form of cookies, IP addresses, referers, information input into forms, and so on is NOT something you have essentially shared with that party as well as any 3rd-parties they wish to share it with?
As far as I'm concerned, if you hang your tighty whiteys on a clothesline, your neighbors have every right to sell T-shirts with a picture of your skid marked underwear on them. Don't like it? Get a dryer. ...or in this case, get blocking software or simply don't visit the site.
IE10's DNT implementation is a bad joke and as far as I'm concerned Yahoo! has every right to ignore it.
DNT+, Ghostery these are all out there. Frankly there's probably very few websites now that don't track your IP address and other details with multiple
trackers.
Hell go to cnn.com and Ghostery blocks 10 trackers alone. Two of those are )(*@!@)*# Facebook trackers. Frankly, the amount of information people are collecting about our web browsing activities is becoming staggering and I for one won't rely on a company saying they'll honor "Do not Track" options from the browsers.
As Navin Johnson said "It's out there, see a doctor get rid of it" - The Jerk
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
The W3C DNT spec explicitly says that a browser should not set this by default, yet Microsoft is completely ignoring the spec and turning it on by default. What Yahoo is doing it 100% correct - it's the only right answer to Microsoft completely ignoring the DNT spec, both in it's intent as well as it's actual words. Every other major web property WILL do the same. Apache already has a patch to ignore DNT from IE10, now Yahoo is doing the same, and the rest will follow.
It makes me feel good inside to know that I am creating revenue for the website that I visit, which helps cover the cost of providing that website. Tracking a user and giving targeting advertising increases the value of the advertising campaigns, which translates into more money for the website.
If we didn't have this, the web is going to become subscription-only very quickly.
Slashdot gives me the option to "Disable Advertising" for having positive Karma, but I choose not to use this.
What is annoying, is that the tracking wouldn't be an issue if the online advertising industry would be more honest to consumers about their practices from be beginning so that it would have been accepted early on, and also not give online advertising a bad name by not tricking websites into displaying ads that the web developer has said not to, and also allowing intrusive or misleading advertising (like how many fake 'Download' buttons do you see on Download sites for example).
Is anyone else bothered by the fact that MICROSOFT gives more of a shit about the end user than everyone else?
All that Microsoft did achieve...and all it could achieve is to have others ignore the functionality. They actually destroyed its functionality by embracing it. If Microsoft gave a shit it would be using Tor, or creating similar technology...or even just making their own OS less spyware. I was shocked at how much information Windows 8 wanted from me.
(assumes role of Devil's Advocate...)
Dear User,
The reason we want you to stop using software to block advertisements and tracking cookies is manifold; we rely on advertisement revenue to supply you with our web content. In addition to that, we rely on tracking cookies to track your browser session. We do this to differentiate your session from other registered users, and to maintain the contents of any internet shopping queues you may have currently active. Obstruction the function of these two required services greatly reduces our ability to both provide the content you come to our site for, and our ability to provide you a quality user experience.
The DNT setting is intended, by the specification handed down by the W3C organization, to have no default value. It is intended to contain only the explicit desired value, as chosen exclusively by you, the end user.
Microsoft's decision to set DNT's status in their express setup wizard has made this valuable feature completely useless for its intended function, which is to express you, the end user's, wishes about your privacy online. If we wanted to know Microsoft's opinion on the matter, we would have simply asked them, instead of trying to work with the W3C to get yours.
Due to Microsoft's abuse of the feature poisoning the results, we have no choice but to ignore this setting for Internet Explorer 10 users.
We will (*inaudible mumble*) your preferences with the DNT setting on any other browser, however, so please feel free to migrate away from IE10 if you wish to use this feature.
Thank you,
$InternetContentIndustry
- the details and specificity of your browser of choice as indicated by your browser agent,
- your browser settings,
- your screen real estate in pixels,
- your system fonts,
- your browser plug-ins,
- and the content of your HTTP_ACCEPT headers,
- your time-zone,
- and your javascript-abilities. My browser as set gives out 18.43 bits of identifying information as calculated by the EFF at
.
https://panopticlick.eff.org/
.
Click on their Test Me link to see how much information your browser gives away, and how well you could be tracked even if you opt-out of cookies, and tracking, and Flash cookies, and use Ghostery etc. A lot of your identifying information leaks out anyway.
They are now showing the world, what it is like to use a setting, where the obedience of the websites is voluntary. And they have their cross-site-tracking detection feature.
written from firefox with DNT on, noscript and adblockplus with no-tracking blacklist (no ghostery, as its rather dubious and ABP can do the same with the right lists)
Wonder what percentage of users would rather be tracked by default.
According to a 2012 Pew Internet study, 73% of search engine users said they were against tracking by the search engines, and 68% were against targeted advertising.
The corollary is that respecting DNT even for IE 10 matches what over 70%(*) of the users want, while ignoring it only satisfies the wishes of 28%(**) of the users.
(*) I'm starting with the 'targeted ads' numbers which are the more conservative ones. The survey shows 28% of the users want them and 68% oppose them. Furthermore another 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).
It's not Yahoo that's at fault here, at least not all by itself. Microsoft chose to implement an "on by default" DNT feature in IE10, which goes against the agreed intention of DNT. Microsoft can fix this in many ways, the simplest of which could be to offer the user a choice upon first using IE10 - heck, they can even have the "activate Do Not Track" option selected by default, so people will only have to click "OK".
Why, do you think, did Microsoft choose not to do this? Do you really think that removing that choice from the first use degrades the user experience so much that it validates ignoring a standard and risking justified behavior from parties like Yahoo? Or could it be that it is Microsoft that would like to see DNT marginalized and sees this as the perfect way of doing so: embrace (done), extend (done), extinguish (in 3.. 2.. 1...)