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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
Yep. Turning off scripting is the only answer.
Here is an article on it from Ars Technica, for anyone who thinks I'm making this shit up.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
Apache ignores DNT from versions of IE that have it enabled by default because it's supposed to be something that the user specifically enables, not a blanket "hey ad industry, completely ignore this because it's always on" option.
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
Why spend the effort on the courts?
I could make some money. In fact if you send me 20 dollars and a stamped envelope, I'll send you a brochure on how you too can become a millionaire with this amazing opportunity... all from your home office.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
That happened last year, but it was only for a month. The patch to disregard DNT from IE was actually made by one of the authors of the DNT standard in response to IE catastrophically mutilating the standard, but they soon decided that messing with Apache wasn't appropriate and reverted the patch.
SPAM is unsolicited email sent on your dollar, consuming your resources.
When my CPU is spinning because of your Javascript-super-fancy-tracks-all-the-things advertisement, you are consuming my resources. When I have to download a megabyte of Javascript/Flash/whatever to see your ads, you are consuming my resources. When I have to spend time trying to navigate around annoying hover ads, you are consuming my resources.
At least when I receive spam, I know the spammer has no idea who I am or whether or not I opened their message. Website advertisers try hard to track everything, even when you are very clearly trying to stop them; that is what DNT has demonstrated.
Ads are implicitly requested when you visit an ad-supported site
No, the page is what is requested. My browser is not obligated to do anything at all with the webpage your server sends it. There is no implicit request; you explicitly asked my browser to request ads from the advertisers you choose to do business with.
People making a big deal about this should perhaps rethink why they are entitled to someone else's work (the website) without respecting their terms (the ads).
You put your work on the open web. You did not put it behind a paywall. You did not force me to view your ads before seeing your page.
Nobody wrote an ad blocker because they were angry about textual ads or banner ads. Ad blockers exists because the advertisers have no respect for anyone's desire to not be tracked, to not have hover ads, pop-ups, pop-unders, Flash, Java, and other adware annoyances. Advertisers have shot themselves in the foot with their own greed, and if your website is not saying, "No, I do not want you to piss off my users with these antics" then your website is part of the problem.
Palm trees and 8
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.
Oh come on. The standard was that people would choose whether or not to enable 'do not track', without being specific about how that should be chosen.
So Microsoft let users choose during installation, express settings, or custom settings, with the effects of the express settings (including the DNT setting) elaborated above:
http://i.imgur.com/Wo8nG.png
But then people cried foul and quickly suggested that they meant that people would have to specifically choose for that very specific option a 'yes or no' choice, rather than part of a package of options.
But let's face it, if they still put that in the installation screen, on a separate page, asking users if they would like to be tracked by the advertising industry yes/no, they would still catch a lot of flak and they would quickly suggest that what they really meant was that DNT should be off by default, and the option to turn DNT on should never be advertised (hehe) and instead hidden deeply away in a configuration dialog and named something like "Disable tailor-made rich content that enhances your browsing experience." - and if enough people did manage to find their way there (due to people telling each other about it on social media), the advertising industry would quickly ignore it anyway since there's no legal backing behind it that would result in fines for such disregarding the users' choice.
If anything, Microsoft should be applauded for this. Even if the intended effect may not have been to essentially kill DNT by exposing what a horribly useless feature it is, I don't think anybody sane is losing sleep over the fact that it did.
Too bad the W3C hasn't fully caught on yet and is still at least considering a DNT thing. But good on them for rejecting the current proposal from the advertising industry, I guess.