Slashdot Mirror
W3C Rejects Ad Industry's Do-Not-Track Proposal
itwbennett writes "The W3C's Tracking Protection Working Group, which is mainly concerned with standardizing the mechanisms for server-side compliance with do-not-track requests, has rejected a proposal by from the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) that would have allowed advertisers to continue profiling users who had asked not to be tracked. The proposal would also have allowed them to 'retarget' ads to those users by showing ads relevant to one site or transaction on all subsequent sites they visited, according to the co-chairs of the W3C's Tracking Protection Working Group. The working group co-chairs also said that they planned to reject proposals similar to those made by the DAA."
The most useless checkbox in the history of browsers.
Marketing departments are a bunch of assholes.
I got here through a series of tubes
What is the problem here? Why couldn't the web browser just make sure that the cookies are passed via RFC3514 ( http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt ) compliant packets (with the E bit field set to FALSE) if the advertiser is trustable?
ipv6 is my vpn
I heard somewhere that Apache webservers now explicitly block "Do Not Track" requests from IE browsers. If you can't even count on your webservers to comply with DNT, what good are standards going to do?
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
In some cases it should be permitted to shoot sellers that are getting too close. At least with a paintball gun.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Buy 'Do Not Track' Online.
Have gnu, will travel.
Yep. Turning off scripting is the only answer.
DNT had exactly one use: to determine whether or not advertisers respect the wishes of people who do not want their browsing habits tracked. The verdict is in, and to nobody's surprise advertisers have no respect for anyone. Now we know that we are justified in using ad-blocking plugins and building browsers that block ads by default.
Palm trees and 8
"Do Not Track" is pretty clear. It means "do not track," without exceptions, without room for debate.
This fiasco has basically proved what everyone knew from the beginning, which is that advertisers do not give a damn about people who do not want to be tracked. Luckily, we have a technical solution to the problem: ad blockers. Much like spam filters and pop-up blockers, ad blockers are the solution to advertisers who have no respect and who cannot be trusted.
Palm trees and 8
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes," with a footnote to the effect that the editors would welcome applications from anyone interested in taking over the post of robotics correspondent.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
What effect will this have on the problem? Are the advertisers gonna say, "Oh, gee, I guess we better close up shop and go home"? I think we need to take this further and file claims against advertisers that consume our limited bandwidth. 20 million complaints in small claims court might just work. Cell phone spammers should suffer the same in places where people pay to receive calls.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Why spend the effort on the courts? Ad blockers take under a minute to install.
Palm trees and 8
Twitter-style:
We respectfully decline your request #gosuckleaninfectedbovinecock
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
If the NSA were to respect the DNT header then I would stop fretting about a lot of the rest of this week's news :-)
https://www.abine.com/dntdetail.php
This is the anti-tracking extension that does NOT have a partnership with the ad industry.
It's not so much a question of the companies respecting it as that they're on notice about it. It's like a no-trespassing sign on a fence. It may be easy to hop over the fence, and it doesn't actually stop anyone who intends to trespass. They can't, however, claim they didn't realize they were trespassing if they have to climb over a fence that at every point along it would've had at least one no-trespassing sign visible to them. That makes it much easier to deal with them when they get caught trespassing. That doesn't mean much for an individual, but when a large security breach occurs and information they collected gets stolen it means a lot if there's a class-action suit filed. Or if the breach affects European users who can invoke more stringent laws.
I think we had a pretty decent deal during the era of broadcast TV, newspapers, and magazines. I think we'll have a good deal again some day; but right now it's a war.
Casualty: historic ads, a casualty of 3rd party servers which means the ad isn't part of the file making up the site.
Casualty: uninterrupted TV--the dancing dinosaurs that interrupt regular programming are a direct result of advertisers trying to find a way around TiVo. Ditto for banner crawls during newscasts.
Casualty: Movies free of product placement. Probably a casualty of TiVo also
Casualty: Privacy, duh. Yahoo, Google, etc. all scanning our e-mails to supposedly make things more attractive to advertisers.
There's probably more. What it boils down to is that you had two parties that never really liked eachother. Advertisers and consumers. They reached a sort of uneasy truce. The introduction of new technology led to an arms race. Now it sucks. Most of us are aware of it sucking on the consumer side; but I bet it sucks on the advertiser side too.
I don't know what the new deal will be; but it will come about eventually...
They put forward a proposal that would specifically let them track people who specifically said they don't want to be tracked.
I hope the W3C told them to fuck off in so many words.
The advertisers actually came up with a proposal that said something like ``Well, what we'd like to do is that when the browser user chooses to not be tracked, we'll track them anyway. Would you folks find that acceptable?" Incredible.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Google is Evil! For us Droid users, the Goog pulled all of our adblocking apps from the Play Store! Most of them require a user to be rooted so since you can sideload because of that, the blockers can now be found at the OSS App Store F-Droid!
Advertisements of any kind are illegal on my screen. Adblock has really made it a pleasure to browse the Web again.
Retargeting is 5x more effective than context based ad targeting.
Citation?
Here's why. Imagine that you've just been shopping around for a new pair of shoes. ...Then you get distracted The next day you ... go to a tech blog. ... but look right there, an ad for Nike. Your memory kicks in and you recall shopping for shoes.
How the hell do you forget that you are looking for new shoes? You get reminded every time you put your old ones on.
The Nike ad is right they [sic] so you click and then buy. Was the retargeted ad helpful to you? Some would say yes. Was it invasive? Maybe. Did you buy a pair of shoes from the company that used retargeted ads, absolutely.
No I wouldn't buy the Nikes, because an advert popping up in the middle of a tech blog will piss me off, and if it were not intrusive I would not even notice it on an unrelated site.
What you people ignore is the piss-off factor. There may be some people who will buy something because it took over their screen, but others (like me) will be so annoyed that it is the last thing they will buy. As you suggest, I make buying decisions based on research; eg if I want a camera I will base my choice on as many independent camera reviews as possible. Then I will search for camera sellers' websites to compare prices; then I buy. Adverts popping up on irrelevant websites, billboards or TV will merely annoy me and might put me off entirely.
If you go to a supermarket and they insist on following you down the aisle making suggestions, the solution isnt to pass a law, its to stop going to that supermarket.
So once all supermarkets adopt the same practices, what's the best way to avoid being tracked?