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EFF Coalition Announces New 'Do Not Track' Standard For Web Browsing
An anonymous reader writes: The Electronic Frontier Foundation, privacy company Disconnect, and several other organizations are publishing a new DNT standard. Partners in the coalition include: publishing site Medium, analytics service Mixpanel, AdBlock, and private search engine DuckDuckGo. Thought it's still a voluntary policy, the EFF hopes the new proposed standard will provide users better privacy online. "We are greatly pleased that so many important Web services are committed to this powerful new implementation of Do Not Track, giving their users a clear opt-out from stealthy online tracking and the exploitation of their reading history," said EFF Chief Computer Scientist Peter Eckersley. "These companies understand that clear and fair practices around analytics and advertising are essential not only for privacy but for the future of online commerce."
Oblig xkcd https://xkcd.com/927/
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Without the cooperation of the advertising industry this will be as successful as the last "Do Not Track" initiative.
Have you read the privacy policies of any modern web site? Almost all say "we do not pay any attention at all to any 'do not track' flags, cookies, etc."
My DNT: Noscript, and Ghostery.
If I really, really want to avoid being tracked, I'd switch to TOR. But that's for medical and other very private stuff.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
The fox does not care if the sheep pass a law in favor of vegetarianism.
I can just check a box, dust off my hands and feel safe in the knowledge that all the sites I visit are not tracking me... phew.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
What's the EFF trying to pull here? The only way to enforce DNT is through aggressive blocking at our end. The damn advertisers can put up static ads, with links if they want, on the main page if they want us to see them. Anything more intrusive than that should simply be blocked and forgotten.
We already has a privacy initiative, something called P3P which fizzled. DNT went nowhere, and this project is probably going to go nowhere as well.
The reason is that there are many, many companies whose basis of existence is to intrude as much as they can on the user browsing a site. If they can inject adware/malware, they would.
Real DNT consists of AdBlock, click-to-play or FlashBlock, then keeping the Web browser separated from anything vital, be it in a VM, sandboxed, or both. That way, LSOs or other "super-cookies" left behind are dealt with.
Do we mind the reputable advertisers? Hardly. And before any snide comments, yes, they do exist. Advertisers that understand that the only effect those in-your-face ads with blaring music have is that more people are getting pissed to the point where they start looking for a way to block that shit. Normal ads, banners and maybe even flashing banners, don't provoke that reaction. People load them and may even click them when the topic is interesting.
These are also the kind of advertisers that will honor such do-not-track standards.
And then there's the assholes that just want to abuse you for their gains. The kind of junk that comes piggy-backing with some "free" software that messes with your browser settings and invades your privacy. The kind you absolutely do NOT want.
And these are also the same assholes that don't give a shit about such DNT systems.
And as long as this is the case, people will use ad-blockers and of course they in turn won't give a shit about blocking the "good"... or let's say "less annoying" advertisers along with the real reason they install such content sanitizing tools.
"Honest" advertisers, if you really want us to believe in your DNT tech and not block you whenever we have a chance: Weed out the bad apples in your industry. Lobby for laws that outlaw such practices. For as long as these assholes are allowed to exist, we will block you, too.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
EFF has an ad/tracking blocker https://www.eff.org/privacybad... /. so I block them, but my HOSTS file is what's really blocking what needs to be.
it's a brain dead little thing that sits unobtrusively in the menu bar of Firefox. It detects 3 trackers from
I installed it yet never really used it, noticed it one day (that's how unobtrusive it is) and now use it to block EA.COM while I play my games.
Actually I don't think it's blocking anything just telling me what it can as my HOSTS file is doing all the work, but for a real simple ad/tracking blocker it's ok.