Slashdot Mirror
5 Years Later, 'Do Not Track' System Ineffective
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from ComputerWorld:
"In 2009, a few Internet privacy advocates developed an idea that was supposed to give people a way to tell websites they don't want to be monitored as they move from website to website. The mechanism, which would eventually be built into all the major browsers, was called Do Not Track. ... But today, DNT hangs by a thread, neutered by a failure among stakeholders to reach agreement. Yes, if you turn it on in your browser, it sends a signal in the form of an HTTP header to Web companies' servers. But it probably won't change what data they collect. That's because most websites either don't honor DNT — it's currently a voluntary system — or they interpret it in different ways. Another problem — perhaps the biggest — is that Web companies, ad agencies and the other stakeholders have never reached agreement on what "do not track" really means."
You can't trust ad agencies even if it was spelled out in law. There are always parties who just don't care about anything but making money.
If you want to not be tracked use some anonymizing technologies.
Also: water: wet. Sky: blue. Rob Ford: drunk and high.
More at 11.
"Cookie tracking means you're getting spammed with ads you DO want, instead of the ads you don't want."
Don't care. I don't see any ads, 'wanted' or not.
Adblock+Ghostery+a Refererblocker works for me.
I use a script blocker and am testing out EFF's Privacy Badger: https://www.eff.org/privacybad...
I feel pretty well about my privacy from private enterprises, and luckily I have nothing to hide from the NSA.
One of these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces. - PF
Said one CEO, "I thought it was for the NSA."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Another problem â" perhaps the biggest â" is that Web companies, ad agencies and the other stakeholders have never reached agreement on what "do not track" really means.
"Do not track" is dead because the meaning is so obvious that they couldn't find a way to gut its meaning while pretending to give it lip service.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
"Do not track"?
Everyone wants everything for free, and so there is advertising.
The entire idea of "do not track" was ludicrous.
Everyone wants their free lunches with no strings attached, but there will always be strings.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
Right now, most geeks think of advertising as bad things, because they hate the ads served to them as geeks are a horrible audience demographic. They don't know, that in the real world, people actually WANT advertising. That's why people buy things like newspapers and magazines, BECAUSE of the ads.
No -- that's certainly not why people buy newspapers, except for those people who just want the coupon section (which is generally segregated from the rest of the paper). Who the heck buys a newspaper just for the ads?
As for magazines, there are some which clearly seem to be able the ads -- particularly style magazines and such. Mostly it's something to allow people to drool over clothes and other luxury fashion items they can't afford (or could barely afford). But yeah -- SOME magazines seem to be bought for the ads.
Many others, however, like ones focused on news or politics or science or literature or whatever, are definitely not about the ads. At best, they're a minor annoyance that readers put up with -- very few people buy a copy of Scientific American or The New Yorker for the ads. In some cases, like trade magazines or foodie magazines, the ads can be targeted better, so I can see how some people want that.
In any case, the point is that "in the real world" people do NOT want advertising incessantly. How many people prefer to watch TV with advertisements thrown in (other than as a break to go to the bathroom or get a sandwich)? If everybody did, there would be little reason for technology that allows you to record and fast forward through the commercials.
People are often happy to receive ads on their terms and when they want to receive them. They know what they're getting if they buy a newspaper for the coupon section or if they buy a magazine 90% full of photos of expensive designer clothing ads.
But "real everyday people" are just as annoyed by pop-up ads or random ad interjections getting in their way of accomplishing tasks as anyone else is. And, let's face it, that's what MOST of the advertising on the web is. If I want to buy something on the web, I go to a freakin' merchant site and browse for things. It's not like I have to go out and buy a magazine to show me ads for designer clothes, when I can just go to the websites of the companies that sell this stuff and see the stuff directly!
In sum -- yeah, sometimes people buy things that have ads when they want to see ads. But on the internet, people often just want to get tasks done too -- whether it's sending email via webmail or interacting on Facebook or whatever. I have NEVER EVER in my life heard a person say, "Gee -- I really love how Facebook keeps adding more ads to my newsfeed" or "I really wish that my webmail would have more pop-ups to get in my way when I'm trying to read a message."
I certainly didn't figure this to work at all. I'm actually surprised that the "Do Not Call" list works as well as it does.
As for me, ABP, NoScript, BetterPrivacy and Ghostery seem to do the job well enough
Go on, citizen, stamp the vote card. R or D, your choice.
I gave up on ghostery. they're not bad guys (they cannot be trusted).
use 'disconnect' instead.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Honoring a DNT would mean a high risk that sooner or later the majority of the page served would ask to not track. And that would have meant to return to the old day of "dumb" TV like advertising where they do only lknow statistically who is watching the ad, but not idnvidually. This would mean billions of $ of market evaporating.
From the get go advertised never intended to honor DNT, they simply slowed down any discussion and finally simply pulled excuse out of thin air to not honor it.
And the result is : thanks ghostery, noflash, adblock, and referer check.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
They don't know, that in the real world, people actually WANT advertising. That's why people buy things like newspapers and magazines, BECAUSE of the ads.
Wrong.
In the days before the World Wide Web existed I bought Computer Shopper magazine for the ads (the whole magazine was 95% ads). But that's the rare exception. People DO NOT want ads and they especially do not want the annoying, obnoxious ads that have become so prevalent.
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. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Trackers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop trackers for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(X) Requires too much cooperation from trackers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Trackeres don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of tracking
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with trackers
(X) Dishonesty on the part of trackers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
Use RequestPolicy. It makes both AdBlock and Ghostery obsolete -- by referencing 3rd party servers on an opt-in rather than opt-out basis. It might be a bit tedious to use the first time you visit a new website, but almost always it's obvious what needs to be unblocked.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Who the heck buys a newspaper just for the ads?
You must be a youngun'. Back in the pre-web days there were magazines that were pretty much 100% ads. "Computer Shopper" was one. "Nuts & Volts" was 90% ads. The best part of PC Magazine was the page of tombstone ads at the very back of the magazine, often for some weird product from a garage start-up. I have bought many, many newspapers/magazines "just for the ads".
Too bad - this is precisely this kind of situation where hostfiles can represent a good technical measure to counteract tracking behavior. It's a shame that this particular piece of software is authored by an unreliable individual. While hostfiles are a valid and effective technical countermeasure to website tracking, the author of this particular hostfile manager has often and repeatedly displayed his instability in multiple online forums. Simply google on Alexander Peter Kowalski. I believe any intelligent research will convince users that permitting software written by APK to run in kernelspace is dangerous at best. The software may or may not be just fine, but the software's author has already demonstrated that he cannot be trusted to make rational, acceptable decisions.
Fortunately, the cyberstalking behavior APK has repeatedly demonstrated is almost certainly a compulsive, involuntary behavior on his part. I have no doubt that soon he will demonstrate fully the exact instability I have pointed out here. C'mon, Allie - post a bunch of links to your past posts, or call me "bigmouth" again. I'd say pick the most bellicose and insulting of your past posts; but nearly all of your cyberstalking is consistently offensive and insulting, indicative of a juvenile intellect. Instead of contstantly reposting the same insults and invective, give us something new to gauge your mental state from.
And almost exactly as predicted.
No. Just, no.
Go back to class and learn how HTTP works. The user (and his "agent", the designated software making requests on his behalf) are fully in control of the experience. The website presents content on an open interface, and the user, via his agent, requests it as he sees fit. If he requests the text of the page, but not the images, that's his prerogative, not the site owner's. If he requests only certain images, follows only certain links, and doesn't do certain DOM manipulations via scripting, that also is the viewer's prerogative. The site owner has fuck-all to say about it.
That's why site owners cannot win against AdBlock. HTTP was built for exactly the situation that AdBlock enforces. It's just that most site owners got used to lazy, unconfigurable user agents that didn't do what their users actually wanted. Now that some users are daring to go against that "standard", site owners are showing their true colors by becoming a bunch of whiny asshats.
This has nothing to do with geeks, either. AdBlock is becoming my go-to tool for people that complain their "internet is slow". And once they get a glimpse of the web without ads, it's game over. Nobody wants advertising. People tolerate advertising as long as what they get in return is worth putting up with some no-skill ass-clown shouting about the product he's been hired to shill for. But advertising companies long ago stepped across that line. I have no moral qualms about wiping out advertising completely. I'm willing to do it and put up with whatever consequences there are. Advertisers are wise to not push me or those that think similarly.
It's as dumb of an idea as thinking a "do not mug me" shirt would be worthwhile in a high-crime area, and (by measure) it's probably less effective than a rock that keeps tigers away.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Sorry, I had you on adblock.
Cookie tracking means you're getting spammed with ads you DO want, instead of the ads you don't want.
Tell me which ads I do want, I dare you.
It's not difficult. Hint: One word.
Yes, that's right. That word is "none".
If I want something, I know how to search. If I'm looking for inspiration, I know how to search. I watch movie trailers for fun, for example, and then write down which movies I like. There is exactly zero need to shove a trailer down my throat, and more likely than not if you try to, I'll not watch the movie because I don't like your attitude.
Here's how to get customers like me: Put your advertisement budget into making your product better.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org