Google and Apple Weaseling Out of "Do Not Track"

An anonymous reader writes "Per an op-ed in today's New York Times, Google, Apple, and others would be effectively exempt from "Do not track": "[T]he rules would allow the largest Internet giants to continue scooping up data about users on their own sites and on other sites that include their plug-ins, such as Facebook's 'Like' button or an embedded YouTube video. This giant loophole would make 'Do Not Track' meaningless."

Comments

Of Course

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't mean to sound glib but, of course they are!

Both company's entire business models are 100% predicated on tracking people. Facebook has a $200B market valuation based on nothing but tracking the ever-living-shit out of as many people as they possibly can. Two hundred billion fucking dollars! There is simply no way these companies will ever agree to not track anyone when there is that kind of money on the line. For that kind of money they will murder people before they give up tracking. That is "invade a foreign country" levels of money on the line. All those people who thought GM conspired to kill the electric car 20 years ago, this is easily 10x more than that.

Re:I automatically disbelieved this post

[Anonymous Coward]

For one thing, "Do Not Track" has never meant the same thing to the Big Data companies as it has to the layman. In practice Do Not Track really means "do not remind me you are tracking me by showing me obvious clues like ads for shit I already bought last week." But they still track people and build up profiles that they sell/rent to other companies who use it more subtley like estimating your income, race, age, politics, family relations, arrest records, etc and that all goes into thinks like background/credit reports etc. Plus they also wait for the second you accidentally do give them permission and then all those years worth of tracking data in a "ghost profile" gets officially attached to your profile and they start showing you ads for shit you already own.

Re:I automatically disbelieved this post

[Frosty Piss]

Quite right. In summary: none of us here in the peanut gallery have any real way to know who did what. Most of the opinions I've seen here seem to reflect whatever biases each opiner may have. The known facts are few and far between. Of course, I have my own opinions but I won't share them because they reflect my own biases.

This thing is a bit like an Agatha Christie mystery. You may be certain who did it, but you don't really know until Christie tells you. Then you invariably find out you were wrong. Even the strategy of picking the least likely culprit doesn't work. Unfortunately, in this case, we don't have the author to tell us the "truth", so we likely will never know.