Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Firefox Advances Do-Not-Track Technology

Posted by Soulskill on from the just-barely-able-to-track-their-progress dept.

CowboyRobot writes "Despite strong advertising industry opposition, Mozilla is advancing plans to have the Firefox browser block, by default, many types of tracking used by numerous websites, and especially advertisers. 'We're trying to change the dynamic so that trackers behave better,' Brendan Eich, CTO of Firefox developer Mozilla, told The Washington Post. According to NetMarketShare, 21% of the world's computers run Firefox. Eich said the blocking technology, which is still being refined, will go live in the next few months. The blocking technology is based on that used by Apple's Safari browser, which blocks all third-party cookies. Advertisers use these types of cookies to track users across multiple websites. Mozilla's cookie-blocking efforts follow a Do Not Track capability being adopted by all major browsers. But the DNT effort stalled in November 2012, after advertisers stopped participating in the program, following Microsoft making DNT active by default in Internet Explorer 10. Advertisers wanted the feature to be not active by default."

5 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. Backlash by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    So when's the backlash coming against them like with IE?

    1. Re: Backlash by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

      Microsoft's approach to DNT was especially terrible. It does nothing to stop tracking, but it does give advertisers a legal loophole where they can say "even though there was a DNT:1 request header that doesn't necessarily mean the user opted out of tracking".

    2. Re: Backlash by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

      You wanted to lose the ability to opt out of tracking?

      This is how DNT works normally
      DNT:0 indicates that the user has consented to tracking
      DNT:null does not indicate whether or not the user has consented
      DNT:1 indicates that the user has opted out

      Now on IE10 DNT:1 behaves like DNT:null, DNT:null is effectively DNT:0 and there is no way left to actually request not to be tracked.

    3. Re: Backlash by DrXym · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It was MS giving me what I want, and the Apache Software Foundation siding with the advertisers against me. Don't try to spin it into something different.

      No. It was Microsoft making your decision for you, making it entirely justifiable for advertisers to ignore the preference entirely since it doesn't represent your preference. And more likely it had squat to do with them championing privacy and more to do with screwing over Google and other advertisers.

      I'm sure a browser could pose the question with some information the first time the browser is launched to make the preference an explicit user choice.

    4. Re:Backlash by hedwards · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Which is as it should be.

      The website owners and advertises screwed things up for themselves by setting up a system that made it virtually impossible for people browsing the web to opt out. So, measures like this became necessary. At this point, you have to go to extremes if you don't want to be tracked, and there is no informed consent for most people, you have to be constantly following their methods if you wish to opt out. And do things like blocking 3rd party cookies, javascript, flash, constantly clearing your cache etc.

      I'd rather that Mozilla not need to do this, but it's abundantly clear that the advertising industry will not stop of its own accord. We people that browse the web didn't start this war, the advertisers did, and until we get a consistent way of opting into all this tracking, this kind of method is going to be necessary.