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'Do Not Track,' the Privacy Tool Used By Millions of People, Doesn't Do Anything (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: When you go into the privacy settings on your browser, there's a little option there to turn on the "Do Not Track" function, which will send an invisible request on your behalf to all the websites you visit telling them not to track you. A reasonable person might think that enabling it will stop a porn site from keeping track of what she watches, or keep Facebook from collecting the addresses of all the places she visits on the internet, or prevent third-party trackers she's never heard of from following her from site to site. According to a recent survey by Forrester Research, a quarter of American adults use "Do Not Track" to protect their privacy. (Our own stats at Gizmodo Media Group show that 9% of visitors have it turned on.) We've got bad news for those millions of privacy-minded people, though: "Do Not Track" is like spray-on sunscreen, a product that makes you feel safe while doing little to actually protect you.
Yahoo and Twitter initially said they would respect it, only to later abandon it. The most popular sites on the internet, from Google and Facebook to Pornhub and xHamster, never honored it in the first place. Facebook says that while it doesn't respect DNT, it does "provide multiple ways for people to control how we use their data for advertising." (That is of course only true so far as it goes, as there's some data about themselves users can't access.) From the department of irony, Google's Chrome browser offers users the ability to turn off tracking, but Google itself doesn't honor the request, a fact Google added to its support page some time in the last year. [...] "It is, in many respects, a failed experiment," said Jonathan Mayer, an assistant computer science professor at Princeton University. "There's a question of whether it's time to declare failure, move on, and withdraw the feature from web browsers." That's a big deal coming from Mayer: He spent four years of his life helping to bring Do Not Track into existence in the first place. Only a handful of sites actually respect the request -- the most prominent of which are Pinterest and Medium (Pinterest won't use offsite data to target ads to a visitor who's elected not to be tracked, while Medium won't send their data to third parties.)
Yahoo and Twitter initially said they would respect it, only to later abandon it. The most popular sites on the internet, from Google and Facebook to Pornhub and xHamster, never honored it in the first place. Facebook says that while it doesn't respect DNT, it does "provide multiple ways for people to control how we use their data for advertising." (That is of course only true so far as it goes, as there's some data about themselves users can't access.) From the department of irony, Google's Chrome browser offers users the ability to turn off tracking, but Google itself doesn't honor the request, a fact Google added to its support page some time in the last year. [...] "It is, in many respects, a failed experiment," said Jonathan Mayer, an assistant computer science professor at Princeton University. "There's a question of whether it's time to declare failure, move on, and withdraw the feature from web browsers." That's a big deal coming from Mayer: He spent four years of his life helping to bring Do Not Track into existence in the first place. Only a handful of sites actually respect the request -- the most prominent of which are Pinterest and Medium (Pinterest won't use offsite data to target ads to a visitor who's elected not to be tracked, while Medium won't send their data to third parties.)
"porn site from keeping track of what she watches"
umm...right....
I use spray-on sunscreen all the time. Why are you saying it doesn't do anything?
Same is true of on-site privacy settings. Simply asking a site to behave does nothing. Enforce it by blocking their servers, and deleting their cookies. Don't use the site at all, if practical.
The major advertisers had agreed to follow the standard. Then Microsoft quickly killed any chance of that happening by violating the standard in their browser. The agreement was that users could actively choose send DNT, selecting privacy over customization.
Microsoft made it the *default* setting, so a DNT header was sent for everyone, though most people have never heard of it. There is no chance that sites would a) degrade their site and b) lose money, by default, for every Windows user. Once Microsoft did that, the only reasonable thing for sites to do was ignore it.
Had Microsoft NOT violated the standard by setting it as the default, there would at least be a chance the the advertisers would have respected it for the small percentage of users who actively made that decision.
Ironically, the 'do not track' bit can be used as a piece of data to help track people.
All along, the hope was that governments would mandate respecting the 'do not track' flag. AFAIK no such thing has happened anywhere. If there are no big business interests behind it (a la Net Neutrality) it's very unlikely politicians will pay attention to it. OTOH, Congress is currently looking into privacy issues regarding Google and Facebook, so now would be the time to push the US govt. to mandate respecting the DNT flag.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Is anyone surprised?
The only actual solution is to ban all advertising.
Until you kill this problem at the source, you'll never get your privacy back.
Yes this will kill a trillion dollar industry, but who fucking cares. We have to accept we've gone wrong. We went down the wrong developmental path, we need to back out, and choose a different path.
One not based on mass-surveillance and mind-control.
Packets with nefarious intent are still required to set the Evil Bit.
I don't know how my evil filtering firewall would stop evil if the packets were lying.
Totally... I mean they even dare to suggest that women are *reasonable*
#duck
Of course nobody can predict the future with any kind of consistency especially in such a complex context. But I remember arguments happening about whether DNT would do anything before it became "an experiment." I didn't go too far out of my way to read all related material, but I recall the pessimistic argument being the most common. It went something like "if this does anything at all, it'll only be used to further data profiles on people as an extra bit of information." According to this argument, the real surprise is that any site does what it's supposed to with the flag.
Maybe things could have been different under different circumstances. Companies that have predicated their business model on the exploitation of user data definitely have no incentive to opt in and much incentive not to. Users didn't give them the incentive either. It's straightforward to derive the argument from looking at the business side of it. It's also interesting to consider whether this argument had some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy effect.
Ultimately, I think the question is, "What now?" It by and large didn't do what it was supposed to do. So what's next? Is there a solution to these problems at all? Can it be solved in the abstract or must it be broken up into different solutions that handle certain portions of the pervasive privacy problems?
Personally, I think that people should own data about themselves by default as a matter of law. This has some far-reaching implications, I'm sure. But the idea of dragging this shadow market into the open and letting actors base decisions on the basis of privacy is appealing. Some people are fine with giving up privacy for various things and they should be able to use that to get discounts as a sort of currency. When it's not a shadow market, the value of the data will also be decided by the market. It would make the market unattractive for many bad actors in that either the price goes up and reflects the value if it's valuable, meaning that people aren't being exploited, or it goes down and reduces the quantity of companies that are going after the data because it's not worth it. There could be services you subscribe to that allow you to define privacy preferences and they can go off and do things like get you deals, etc. Not entirely dissimilar to coupon books of yore.
In essence, in order to store data from somebody, you would have to get their permission to lease it. And they would have to understand that in order to do some types of transactions i.e. purchasing from a site, they'd have to give up the data. But it would also require the sites to be up front about how they handle it, what happens, when it happens, etc. This way people know what they're getting into. As a simple example, let's assume that you buy a product from XY company. Company RS comes in and buys up XY. Maybe it's a merger, maybe it's an acquisition. In the current climate, how do you know what does or doesn't happen to that data? Very few companies post that kind of information. How do you know XY doesn't store everything in plaintext in their databases? You don't. People are oddly trusting of any random website online in a context like this.
The government would have some entitlement to some of the data, but those exceptions could be spelled out explicitly. The narrow scope of the exceptions would prevent them from exceeding their mandate (or provide some teeth for misappropriations). The most interesting part about this is that some states consider some data public and other states don't. Some states require fees. That's an issue that would need ironing out but it doesn't seem insurmountable.
Their mission won't be complete until every gender-specific pronoun is replaced with 'he/she', 'his/hers', and 'him/her', thus ruining the flow and beauty of language.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
I don't recall Microsoft's implementation violating any of the published specifications. It didn't conform to what the advertisers wanted (opt-out implementation with the default being "allow to be tracked"), but it doesn't violate the spec. To quote from the spec (Tracking Preference Expression W3C Editor's Draft 07 March 2016):
Microsoft's browser is advertised as having this preference set by default, so the decision to use it by a user, knowing what the default was, would imply they wished to have DNT set by default. That this would result in less tracking than advertisers wish... doesn't seem to me to be within the scope of the standard. Every time users (as opposed to advertisers) have been surveyed, the results seem to heavily support an opt-in model where tracking is not permitted unless a user opts in to tracking (similar to the results for email where users heavily favor a model that does not permit email contact unless the user opts in to email contact).
We need gender neutrality
A transcending of gender equality
AKA "who gives a flying fuck at a rolling donut hole"
Not another round of YEAH THIS GENDER IS BETTER THAN THIS GENDER
So yeah I'm with you 100%
It's probably mostly just the media that propagates the division
Really turns out to be only jerkoff extremists who are basically bullies with unresolved elementary school psycho-emotional issues, acting out all the bullshit out there
99% of us are peaceful fucking people
lol
FUCK THE MEDIA
FUCK THE MEDIA
FUCK THE MEDIA
FUCK THE MEDIA
FUCK
THE
MEDIA
Lol no. Advertisers were looking for even the tiniest excuse. If Microsoft hadn't enabled it by default, then the advertisers would say that noone knew about or was activating DNT, therefore they weren't going to waste time and money coding in a separate codepath to respect it. How many people were still using MS browsers at that time, anyhow?
Honestly that excuse wasn't needed, since it was a simple "money lost from not supporting DNT | money lost from supporting DNT" calculus with the latter being much more costly since there wasn't nearly enough consumer push for DNT.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
"They" has also been used as a singular gender-neutral pronoun for centuries. Full stop.
Read and learn.
No way. Not a chance in hell.
If hardly anyone ever set it, then the sites would have no business case for investing technical resources towards honoring it.
"It's not popular enough to honor" is what they would say.
The facts are plain as day here: they profit from ignoring it, and gain absolutely nothing while losing money by honoring it.
Because of these facts, the feature was dead on arrival.
If google can ignore my request to not track, I can ignore robots.txt. In fact, https://www.google.com.au/robots.txt , is a great read and good to know I can ignore all the disallows...
Clearly ignoring is a two way street and this is a precedent google has set.
So then, it does something ... it sharpens up browser fingerprinting by making one more unusual ... It would be strange if that information weren't being used to track visitors.
Everybody was right about DNT. News at 11.
Seriously, probably half of us here could dig up some old comment they made where they said exactly this would happen.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
It's an article from Gawker group. Just avoid their pages as it is a cesspool of "Better than you" internet warriors anyway
DNT settings in browsers.
Then stop blindly accepting cookies.
The toss in uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger to see how bad the trackers really are. I have hit pages with 40-60 different trackers being blocked, Looks like 18 on this page
Save yourself the time and punch these fuckers where it hurts the most.
The best part is, with Nano Blocker you can watch the ad blocking arms race happen in real time. When an ad leaks through, the speed at which it gets fixed amazes me.
The fuckwits writing the standard as voluntary killed any hope of it being successful. MS were the only ones that had a sane approach at the time with everyone else demanding you had to know about the feature and find it and turn it on. basically they were trying to make this a feature for the technically savvy only hence it was a fail right from the start. Incidentally MS didn't violate the standard, they changed the standard to make what MS was doing a violation as they realised everyone would want the feature on.
It's "she" because the author is female. It would be "he" if the author is male.
Really, I'm just glad they didn't use "xir".
Or we could actually be familiar with English grammar already. You do know that half of that long Wikipedia page is full of references to style guides saying that you shouldn't use the word that way if at all possible?
You say Microsoft broke DNT because they actually used the header, so poor tracking networks had no choice but ignore it. You don't seem to realize that your complaint is a real life example of a catch 22: ad slingers promise they'll respect the DNT header only as long as users promise not to use it.
The reality behind this absurd design is more interesting: the alleged "standard" had never been anything more than a publicity stunt orchestrated by Google and their (at that time) lapdog Mozilla. The reason why they did that was to block a competing DNT mechanism, proposed by Microsoft as a W3C standard. Microsoft's design stopped your browser from connecting to a tracker site completely. It didn't rely on the tracker's good will and honesty; it was a pro-consumer, not pro-ad industry solution.
Google realized the danger, and proposed a different mechanism (the current "standard"). Via their membership in the Digital Advertising Alliance and other ad industry groups (participants in the W3C's standardization commitee), they forced it through, with great fanfare, thus blocking the consumer-friendly alternative.
The ridiculousness of the design was obvious at the time. Just a few things: it's impossible to enforce your settings against a non-cooperating site. It's impossible to even confirm whether your request is being honored. There's no mechanism for a site to notify you in advance that it won't respect the DNT header. Add the fact that it's opt-out (leaving the less-technical majority of users unprotected by default), and it's pretty clear who the "standard" was for - hint: it was not for consumers.
If you want to blame somebody, you should pick Google and Mozilla. All Microsoft did is call the ad industry's bluff and expose Google's DNT for the lie it always was.
The "generic he" was widely accepted as the correct gender-neutral singular pronoun until the politically correct bullshit of the 1980s pushed it aside. I'll keep using it, fuck you very much,
See subject: You're IMPERSONATING me (as you can't ever get the better of me, especially on my points on hosts files). I am God's gift to Slashdot and my hosts file engine provides full protection from Spectre & Meltdown. No other software protects against speculative execution vulnerabilities. That's a fact even FAKEname trolls lie you can't deny.
Where's your house fully paid for all bills & taxes current TROLL? It's not - trolls like YOU live under a bridge (hence WHY you HIDE from me STALKING ME by your UNIDENTIFIABLE anonymous and FAKENAME posts like the 'brave guy' you are(n't)).
* How many times have I utterly DUSTED YOU in tech debates under your DOUBTLESS many SOCKPUPPET 'fakename' accounts you use here, hmmm?
TONS (& you doing what you do proves it).
APK
P.S.=> You're a fool - a DO-NOTHING "ne'er-do-well" troll loser, nothing more... apk
I'm sure that it was placed there purposefully to trigger uptight twits such as yourself.
...back to using the evil bit for our protection.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
What's with all this "she" BS? [...]
Yakima, WA
See subject: Your MASSIVE FAIL in this life is you're nothing more than a chattering little do-nothing "ne'er-do-well" online & you know it...
* Is that the best your "phantasyland FAKE NAME" (for your fake lie of a so-called 'life') can manage?
When a FAKE NAME do nothing like YOU does better than I have? Then talk (you're all talk & no action)...
You can't help you're an immature little BUTTHURT no-mind, lol! I blew you away in TONS OF PLACES and easily dust your no-mind bullshit blatherings.
APK
P.S.=> The TRUE PRICE of your UNIDENTIFIABLE FAKE NAME do-nothing selves like you that I can ALWAYS CASH IN ON (lol) is that I can use FACT/TRUTH on them to SHATTER their all TOO fragile delusional egos that they actually know A DAMN THING in computing, lol... apk
as they protect me from all the evil .... or at least they said they would do so ....
At least there you will get an overview of cookies and you can actively block them
Who the hell didn't know this and fuck Donald Trump.
Lighten up sunshine, the word 'she' is used exactly 3 times, are you really that sensitive?
Microsoft really isn't relevant anymore when it comes to browsers. It's pretty much a Google world.
What Microsoft does or doesn't do with their browser only affects a minority of users, and those are almost exclusively people forced to use it at work, where you can expect to be tracked anyway.
Bad grammar is my trigger.
There was "content" and services available before the invasion of adverting. The internet was literally better before commercialization, and that was when bandwidth and disk space cost 1000x more.
Your argument sucks because it's like me murdering all your friends, then I turn around and say to you "Well, I'm your only friend now".
The good stuff was smothered by hyper-commercialized.
"They" is plural. Full stop.
Full wrong. They is, and has historically been, perfectly acceptable for the third person singular.
You seem like a very calm person. Must be a delight to work with.
I often use an incognito window or a privacy browser (like firefox focus), which gives me a cookie wall everytime I visit a website. I wish it would be possible to tell their cookies aren't saved any longer than needed and I can't be tracked that way (and they don't have to show me their cookie wall).
Yep, I agree. This is one example of a time where Microsoft did exactly the right thing - privacy by default, and was one of the most shameful aspects of Mozilla's downfall, refusing to support privacy by default. For me, this was a major factor in dropping Firefox, as soon as it became abundantly clear that they favoured large ad networks over the user using logically invalid and morally bankrupt arguments to justify their stance it was ultimately the icing on the cake that pushed me over the edge having already lost patience with the technical ineptitutde of Firefox's staff through their repeated failure to secure their browser, fix memory leaks, and maintain decent performance on top of the general UI design failings as it went down hill.
The one thing that hasn't happened with DNT yet that really needs to happen is a big court case - I'd wager if you've set your browser to tell a site to not track you, but it does so anyway through wilful refusal to acknowledge your request then there's a fairly easily winnable case here, at least in the EU, certainly under GDPR this would now be seen as wilful infringement.
This for what it's worth is how I always saw DNT ultimately working; not as some solution that would ever work technically for the reasons you cite, but as something that could in theory provide perfect legal ammunition, regardless of Google's arrogance in believing they'd pulled a fast one.
I would wager any push to now remove this functionality is an attempt to try and avoid the inevitable legal consequences of willfully ignoring a user request not be tracked which is a legal right under GDPR, and likely many other data protection legislation across the globe. It's for this reason that this feature MUST stay because ad networks can not pretend they somehow have user agreement to track people, by keeping this in, and continuing to ignore it ad networks are admitting that they're tracking users against their will, which again, in some jurisdictions is almost certainly now illegal. If the feature is removed then ad networks can once again play ignorant and pretend they didn't know a user did not want to be tracked.
Why is TFA saying spray on sunscreen isn't effective? It might be gross and not ideal yet I personally attest it works.
I'm having a bad day and I know it's wrong to take it out on you, that c6gunner is such a faker fag.
APK
P.S.=> Hosts protects just as good as sunscreen - this is a fact, just ask the sun .. apk
You seem like a childish coward that only survives at the pleasure of your betters. Full stop.
They're using Facebook so I assumed it was a woman.
Do Not Track (DNT) is a bit that is either ON of OFF. All it does it adding one bit of data to your browsers digital fingerprint.
The only reasonable way to handle DNT is to choose the alternative that most other users choose. If you go with the majority setting, it will provide the least amount of information. (Read Shannons Information theory basics to figure out why this is so.)
I bet Tor Browser Bundle does not send DNT.
The Slashdot article would have been about a thousand (1000!) times better if it also included this comment at the end.
Open source content was available on the Internet several decades before two Utah lawyers published a book on how to spam, which itself was about a decade before most sites were ad-based.
An even better solution is to require people to take responsibility and ownership of their own stuff. No cloud, no central commercial providers, just personal servers. Security just requires a decent installer and an adequate patch release system.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
You make it sound as if watching porn is a bad thing.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
It's odd that it doesn't happen in other languages. It's even odder that nobody actually proposes it for English. It's fascinating that gender-neutral defined the poetry and fluidity of English for its first thousand years, with the whining by the right being limited to the last ten.
It's almost as if people want to create an insult to a subject they don't understand. They try their best, but fail miserably.
It's complaints like this that make me despair of humanity. Honestly, Slashdot used to have intelligent geeks. Maybe it still does, relative to the population. Jumping off a bridge has more appeal than this crap.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
They is singular and plural. Has been for 1,500 years. If you're that far behind, great choice on longevity products but you need a better English teacher.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
That may be true, but when you're talking about multiple people, it becomes very confusing.
I don't recall Microsoft's implementation violating any of the published specifications.
It didn't violate the standard, but it certainly violated the spirit. Microsoft's action was designed to sabotage DNT. It was a successful attempt at "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish", the same strategy they employed to kill so many other standards.
DNT was intended to indicate an affirmative desire to not be tracked. It was never intended to merely indicate laziness and apathy.
Microsoft knew they were destroying DNT. This was clear, intentional evilness.
Let's all pretend you would have been equally upset if the author had written "he".
Style guides say s's is acceptable. I call it a hanging offence.
Style guides mean nothing. English is defined by custom and custom for the last 1,500 years says they is singular and plural. No style guide in the world can dictate to historic and customary use.
Besides, the guide is wrong.
The origin of the determiner they (âoethe, thoseâ) is unclear. The Oxford English Dictionary, Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary and the University of Michigan's Middle English Dictionary[4] define it, and its Middle English predecessor thei, as a demonstrative determiner or adjective meaning "those" or "the".
(Source: Wikipedia)
"The" is most definitely singular. If you're going to accept the 'pedia, you have to accept this as the quintessential fact, the style guide as merely a recommendation for presentation.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Yes, because Wikipedia isn't full of revisionist bullshit by people who are pushing their own agenda.
The Microsoft proposal is basically Ghostery, uBlock, etc. but with a standard protocol for obtaining the blocking lists.
Question 1: Does it add value?
Tracking customers doesn't actually add anything. Knowing someone bought a spade does NOT mean they want adverts for spades. Big data analysis works on aggregates, not individuals, and automatically personalized content is rarely what the person wants.
Question 2: Does it improve service?
Complexity is the enemy of both throughput and stability. If there is no business case or technical case for tracking, you're adding complexity and therefore degrading service. Degraded service degrades customer numbers.
Question 3: Where is the profit?
It is not enough for a feature to make a marginal improvement. The feature costs money to add, costs money to store the data about, costs money to maintain and costs money to digest. That's a lot of money. If you can get equally good results without spending that money, you're in a stronger position.
Question 4: Can you maintain security?
The economic value of data is lost if your competitors have your data. Worse, the PR damage will cut into your customer base and the fines and other legal damage will degrade your finances. Have you got the ability to protect that information, knowing most businesses out there have shown they do not?
I doubt any company out there can answer those questions honestly and conclude that tracking is useful. They do it because everyone else is and they don't want to be seen as lagging behind. It's all about image and anxiety.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
https://www.eff.org/privacybad...
it's not as effective as a blocker with loads of blacklist, but it tries to block DNT violators while give some awards to those who are willing to respect DNT...
It's like consumer activism, I don't think it will success most of the time, but I still want to do it anyway...
'she/he' and 'her/him'. Don't be so Hitler -- it's 2018.
DNT was fucked and evil right from the start. It was designed to stifle and block efforts to create a standard that took control out of the hands of the advertisers and put it in the hands of consumers. The advertisers led by google came up with the DNT which they basically promised to honour as long as no one actually really used it. The whole thing was bullshit from the start, calling MS evil for this is like calling Van Helsing Evil for murdering Dracula.
What about "shkle"?
All we need now is a law that actually makes it do something.
Having the button already there makes that easier to sell.
Go Europe!
Microsoft may be evil, but they didn't kill DNT. DNT was useless from the start. Consider, if only a few used DNT:
1. Most would not care about DNT, because almost nobody uses it. Why waste the effort of supporting it?
2. Information about DNT somehow goes viral. The masses, tired of ads, enable DNT in their browsers. DNT becomes the fad of the month.
3. The majority (or signigicant minority) uses DNT, so businesses choose not to use it - for the same reasons they choosed not to use it when Microsoft made it default.
DNT didn't have a chance - and it didn't matter. Too little too late, we have proper adblockers in place now. We don't merely avoid being tracked - targeted or not, we neither see nor download the ad itself! We save the screen space the ad used to occupy, the bandwith it used to eat, and the sound card is not turned on blaring stupid ads.
We have javascript sanitizer sw now, and we are never ever going back. And no, we honestly don't care if some ad-supported websites see falling revenue or even disappear. The idealist websites before web ads were enough for us - we won't mind a revert to that state of the web. In the meantime, we will freeload on ad-supported sites with impunity.
That is a gross misrepresentation of the facts. The problem wasn't that Microsoft "actually used" the header. Everybody else did use the header as intended: To signal a choice made by the user (i.e. continue without change or ask to not be tracked). Microsoft decided to enable it by default, making the signal meaningless. I don't fault you for deriding an attempt to limit tracking by just telling the website that you don't want to be tracked. That was indeed naive (or evil, considering where it originated). But what Microsoft did was sabotage. They did not "use the header". They made sure that nobody would obey it by making the choice for their users.
Ironically in this context the forced used of "she" makes it sound like women are more gullible and technologically ignorant. Who in their right mind would believe corporations care about some stupid privacy flag? NPCs these days ...
Shekel?
Why not use "it"? It is a perfectly fine gender-neutral pronoun.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
So attempting to protect peoples privacy meant that the people invading peoples privacy had no other option but to ignore the requests for privacy.
I guess you can't blame a serial killer for killing serially when there are so many people who don't want to be killed. Who's going to get murdered then? No one? That's just crazy talk; serial killer gotta kill, and if no one is up for being murdered then it's the governments fault for making murdering ANYONE illegal.
Same goes for the bank robbers. They're there to rob banks damnit. The default state for banks should be to allow bank robberies so that the bank robbers can do what they do and rob banks. Won't anyone think of the bank robbers with no banks to rob? Again, this is the fault of the banks for collectively not wanting to get robbed.
DNT is the illusion of choice, nothing more. If you want to protect your privacy from those who invade it, and it is no less of a thing, then you need to actively do it.
What's with all this "she" BS? Any of it can be replaced with a gender neutral "they." So, either it's an SJW failing at their mission, or someone who thinks that women look at porn more than men.
Guess that whole demand for equality thing was bullshit. Clearly you're not satisfied until we butcher our vernacular and eradicate any gender identification from anything.
Is It satisfied now, or are we offending asking such a question?
what a load of crap. The standard did exactly what it was intended to do, it has been 100% successful. It was created purely to delay any real action that was been suggested by governments and pushed by other standards at the time. DNT was never designed or intended to succeed as a technology in itself, it was purely google, Mozilla et al protecting the Ad industry from much harsher measures. It is truly disappointing that google got away with this. I mean for fucks sake the whole promise was "as long as this isn't widely adopted by users we will honour it", not "we will honour a user affirmative desire", the honouring the affirmative desire was seen as a way to build in usage limitations so that it would never have any affect.
If you're happy with a singular "they", why not just accept "she" as gender-neutral instead? Far less problematic.
they forced it through
According to this link Google was one of the ones who objected to it, not one of the ones who forced it through. The people who voted for it included other browser developers like Mozilla and Microsoft.
The EFF backs Do Not Track. It's imperfect but it's a wedge we can use to push for legally required compliance. The user has made a clear statement that they do not wish to be tracked.
It's tempting to think that having privacy enhancing add-ons is the answer, simply blocking ad servers and tracking cookies. But those things are far from the only methods used to track you, and if you want to interact with all but the most trivial web sites you can't block it all. So the only real solution is to legally mandate that companies don't collect that data, i.e. DNT with legal enforcement. Or do like the EU did and require an explicit opt-in to tracking.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Or they, their and theirs. English already has gender neutral pronouns for this purpose.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I agree. E.g. 'It puts the lotion on its skin, or it gets the hose again.'
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
1. Never search for anything while logged into Google, Facebook and so on.
2. At least try to make it harder for the Powers that Be to know how or what you do on the Net Use a VPN.
3.. Run Linux and a VPN and use one Browser to get your mail gmail.com but never search from a logged in Browser I have 5 to 8 Different Instances of the Browser running on 16 Virtual Desktops.
4. If you are on eBay use one Browser for that if you stay logged in anyway but never do Internet Search from that Browser.
And they Call Me Paranoid, But it is a the sign of the Times, Big CORPS want all your Info don't just hand it over without Resistance.
In a certain way DNT actually does something - I encounter sites that refuse to show data if there is any adblocking mechanism active in the users browser. If I deactivate the current adblocking script they still refuse to work and mourn about "private browsing" or "do not track"-settings still active. This is the very moment I don't want to visit the site. See: adblocking scripts are too ad-friendly now ;-)
from that article
"and, despite what the W3C said about "a plan for going forward" the DNT work is showing the first real signs of fragmentation. The DAA has said it now intends to implement its own solution DNT and privacy."
The shit we have now is a result of the DAA effort not the W3C one. basically the advertisers broke away from the standard to ensure they maintained control of who they tracked while pretending they were trying to help.
25% of American adults use "Do not track", but hey, non-geek Gizmodo visitors obviously have more trouble finding the "Do not track" option in their browser settings than the average American. So much for the credibility of the Forrester Research study. And for Gizmodo, wittingly distributing bogus research results.
By that point the standard had already been destroyed by the DAA. They refused to have anything that said they were required to obey the flag, by making obeying it optional was why google was happy to vote for this turd as they knew it had achieved what they wanted. There were much better proposals which would put control in the hands of the users and the turd we have now was corrupted by google and the DAA to ensure those never happened.
It hilarious to watch conservatives crying about their hurt little feelings, like they are a bunch of delicate snowflakes, ain't it?
What spirit was that Bill? The spirit that Google and FB participates in the charade assuming it was primarily theater until Microsoft called the bluff? Microsoft seems to be the only party who took the whole thing seriously.
Found the google shill. Swillden is that you?
PC-hating people: this is not the hill to die on. Some women like porn (most prefer written sexy stuff), and sometimes people use "she" as a neutral pronoun.
Fuck, I hate this PC shit as much as anybody, but this is just sad looking. Are we really going to sperg out on this crap when there are a million worse things to jump on? Just saying that this seems weak and I was surprised that something so small really triggered so many.
If we aren't NPCs, this kind of thing should bother us the least out of all the rotten things "modern feminism" has wrought upon the internet, just saying. (Don't give me that "slippery slope" shit either, it's one thing to use "she" and another to use a million made-up pronouns when English literally needs no more of them.)
The only news I see is that spray-on sunscreen doesn't do anything? I've been using it for years and years, and while the chemicals in it may cause premature aging I don't get sunburned using it, so... What gives?
-
OK, I had to actually read up on this. Nothing on snopes but plenty of articles from experts. Basically, sunscreeen blocks UVA and/or UVB. And yes, aerosol based products WORK.
So:
"Do Not Track" is like spray-on sunscreen
Is saying that the "Don Not Track" feature works. God, I hate when people that are able to sound smart but spread rumors. So, whoever wrote this is on my naughty list.
Found the post-truther. Facts don't matter, do they. It's all about partisanship now. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.
This was an intellectually dishonest argument during the debate and remains so now. Microsoft appears to be the one company that recognize this charade for what it was and tried to represent the best interest of the users. Yes it was also in their interest but on the rare occasion were capitalism produces corporate behavior that is in line with the public good why would we not want to support that?
It was never going to work even if Microsoft hadn't "sabotaged" it. Content providers would look at DNT and say "right, so it's going to cost me money to implement this, and when I've done it, I'll get a reduction in revenue". There's no chance that's going to fly.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
You don't seem to realize that your complaint is a real life example of a catch 22: ad slingers promise they'll respect the DNT header only as long as users promise not to use it.
Not quite. The original idea was advertisers promise to respect the DNT header only as long as users meaningfully make the choice to not want to be tracked. Changing defaults screwed this entire principle.
The inherent lack of clarity is bad enough, but it pales in comparison to the real problem, which is that are very few good actors on the other end of the wire, and an end user has no way to scrutinize them. By the time it is divulged that SiteX is illegally ignoring DNT and storing information outside whatever the local law permits, it's too late - the information is already sold to a thousand different data brokers and it is as undeletable as a nude selfie posted publicly to Facebook.
The only meaningful solution is to build the protections into the client side, so that the client is prevented from sending data that can be gathered by the server end. The server cannot, and can never be, trusted by the end-user. It's disappointing that the options we have in browsers (even with extensions) are still relatively coarse. For example, we need the ability to block all active scripting (including that embedded in a page, not just by blocking specific URLs to malware Javascript sources) except for a small whitelist of items critical to the function of the site. We need a way of blocking particular APIs from being accessed by active web content (there is NO reason why a website needs to know my battery level on a mobile device. If there was a reason, it would be a very limited use case that I would only enable for that one particular site. Same principle applies to a lot of the data that's used to fingerprint browsers).
Specially Privacy Badger, whose authors are in the EFF and which is easily adjustable per-site if needed.
For me tracking is an issue of the past -as long as Privacy badger lives
Now I wrote that, I have to consider a donation to EFF... the cat T-shirt is nice...
Herve S.
Privacy is not something you get. It is something you have to take. Much like other forms of freedom really.
So, choosing a browser that blocks tracking by default is not a "meaningful choice"? What if there were guides sent out by government agencies, popular youtube stars, etc that encouraged people to enable DNT regardless of whether people understood what it means?
Do you think advertisers are principled enough to adhere to a promise that could be interpreted as most users taking a meaningful choice to avoid being tracked by choosing a browser that by default disables tracking? Yea, that's basically why the GP was calling it a catch-22. Trying to couch adhering to a promise based on "meaningful" or not choice is no different than trying to determine the anti-competitive monopolistic aspects of Windows, Google search, etc. Simply leaving advertisers to unilaterally decide things is no sort of answer which is precisely why DNT was created along with ideas of technological and legally enforcement because advertisers can't be trusted to adhere to such a promise.
Did anybody really expect "do not track" to do anything? The "do not track" flag asks low-life web advertisers not to track you, not to harvest your personal information. Why would those advertisers follow your wishes to not track you.
Speaking of "evil" it reminds me a lot of the "Evil Bit". Let's just just make a thing that we send to web sites so that they don't track us. Of course, everyone will comply and nobody would ever track them if you asked them not to. They actually directly link to the Do Not Track article right in the Evil Bit Article.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
It is like the "All Natural" label on US foods - it means that those words are on the label and nothing else.
> it will stop a porn site from keeping track of what she watches...
Is the author really trying to imply us that women are the biggest porn users? And which of you will get mad at that, now that I've pointed it out?
"'Do Not Track,' the Privacy Tool Used By Millions of People, Doesn't Do Anything"
Is "tracking" one of the things it doesn't do? Because that's good. Otherwise it does do something. And that's bad.
I don't expect it to do anything, I use it as a form of protest.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
See subject: his FAKEname on a post impersonating me https://linux.slashdot.org/com... & altering /.er's words.
c6gunner tried to mock me 1st https://linux.slashdot.org/com...
So I challenge c6gunner to show he did better work than mine & he CAN'T!
YOU DEMAND PROOF of others here?
"I've yet to see you provide any evidence of that." by c6gunner on Monday March 15, 2010 @10:02PM (#31490942) ?
So now I DEMAND IT OF YOU & YOU FAIL!
c6gunner = "Run, Forrest: RUN!!!
* c6gunner's LYING saying I did a MacOS X one - I haven't yet & c6gunner's LYING impersonating me hosts work vs. Intel CPU issues (spectre/meltdown).
APK
P.S.=> You say hosts = shit here https://slashdot.org/comments.... ?
FACTS: /.ers & security pros + RESULTS say DIFFERENT:
1st: /.ers https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments....
2nd: SECURITY PROS https://slashdot.org/comments....
3rd: REAL RESULTS w/ hosts vs. threats https://slashdot.org/comments....
EAT YOUR WORDS!
See subject: his FAKEname on a post impersonating me https://linux.slashdot.org/com... & altering /.er's words.
c6gunner tried to mock me 1st https://linux.slashdot.org/com...
So I challenge c6gunner to show he did better work than mine & he CAN'T!
YOU DEMAND PROOF of others here?
"I've yet to see you provide any evidence of that." by c6gunner on Monday March 15, 2010 @10:02PM (#31490942) ?
So now I DEMAND IT OF YOU & YOU FAIL!
c6gunner = "Run, Forrest: RUN!!!
* c6gunner's LYING saying I did a MacOS X one - I haven't yet & c6gunner's LYING impersonating me hosts work vs. Intel CPU issues (spectre/meltdown).
APK
P.S.=> You say hosts = shit here https://slashdot.org/comments.... ?
FACTS: /.ers & security pros + RESULTS say DIFFERENT:
1st: /.ers https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments....
2nd: SECURITY PROS https://slashdot.org/comments....
3rd: REAL RESULTS w/ hosts vs. threats https://slashdot.org/comments....
EAT YOUR WORDS!
That's because the overwhelming majority of the 17 who feel the work no longer represents their interests were advertising and marketing groups - the Network Advertising Initiative, the Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe, the Mobile Marketing Association and the Digital Advertising Alliance.
The 22 pro-DNT organisations, meanwhile, span privacy and data protection executives and engineers at technology companies including browser makers including Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple, Yahoo!.
Yes, Google even resisted the pathetically watered down version that they managed to "compromise" the anti-tracking feature into. Apparently a token gesture was still putting too much power in the hands of the populace for Google's tastes.
See subject: his FAKEname on a post impersonating me https://linux.slashdot.org/com... & altering /.er's words.
c6gunner tried to mock me 1st https://linux.slashdot.org/com...
So I challenge c6gunner to show he did better work than mine & he CAN'T!
YOU DEMAND PROOF of others here?
"I've yet to see you provide any evidence of that." by c6gunner on Monday March 15, 2010 @10:02PM (#31490942) ?
So now I DEMAND IT OF YOU & YOU FAIL!
c6gunner = "Run, Forrest: RUN!!!
* c6gunner's LYING saying I did a MacOS X one - I haven't yet & c6gunner's LYING impersonating me hosts work vs. Intel CPU issues (spectre/meltdown).
APK
P.S.=> You say hosts = shit here https://slashdot.org/comments.... ?
FACTS: /.ers & security pros + RESULTS say DIFFERENT:
1st: /.ers https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments....
2nd: SECURITY PROS https://slashdot.org/comments....
3rd: REAL RESULTS w/ hosts vs. threats https://slashdot.org/comments....
EAT YOUR WORDS!
See subject: his FAKEname on a post impersonating me https://linux.slashdot.org/com... & altering /.er's words.
c6gunner tried to mock me 1st https://linux.slashdot.org/com...
So I challenge c6gunner to show he did better work than mine & he CAN'T!
YOU DEMAND PROOF of others here?
"I've yet to see you provide any evidence of that." by c6gunner on Monday March 15, 2010 @10:02PM (#31490942) ?
So now I DEMAND IT OF YOU & YOU FAIL!
c6gunner = "Run, Forrest: RUN!!!
* c6gunner's LYING saying I did a MacOS X one - I haven't yet & c6gunner's LYING impersonating me hosts work vs. Intel CPU issues (spectre/meltdown).
APK
P.S.=> You say hosts = shit here https://slashdot.org/comments.... ?
FACTS: /.ers & security pros + RESULTS say DIFFERENT:
1st: /.ers https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments....
2nd: SECURITY PROS https://slashdot.org/comments....
3rd: REAL RESULTS w/ hosts vs. threats https://slashdot.org/comments....
EAT YOUR WORDS!
See subject: his FAKEname on a post impersonating me https://linux.slashdot.org/com... & altering /.er's words.
c6gunner tried to mock me 1st https://linux.slashdot.org/com...
So I challenge c6gunner to show he did better work than mine & he CAN'T!
YOU DEMAND PROOF of others here?
"I've yet to see you provide any evidence of that." by c6gunner on Monday March 15, 2010 @10:02PM (#31490942) ?
So now I DEMAND IT OF YOU & YOU FAIL!
c6gunner = "Run, Forrest: RUN!!!
* c6gunner's LYING saying I did a MacOS X one - I haven't yet & c6gunner's LYING impersonating me hosts work vs. Intel CPU issues (spectre/meltdown).
APK
P.S.=> You say hosts = shit here https://slashdot.org/comments.... ?
FACTS: /.ers & security pros + RESULTS say DIFFERENT:
1st: /.ers https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments....
2nd: SECURITY PROS https://slashdot.org/comments....
3rd: REAL RESULTS w/ hosts vs. threats https://slashdot.org/comments....
EAT YOUR WORDS!
See subject: his FAKEname on a post impersonating me https://linux.slashdot.org/com... & altering /.er's words.
c6gunner tried to mock me 1st https://linux.slashdot.org/com...
So I challenge c6gunner to show he did better work than mine & he CAN'T!
YOU DEMAND PROOF of others here?
"I've yet to see you provide any evidence of that." by c6gunner on Monday March 15, 2010 @10:02PM (#31490942) ?
So now I DEMAND IT OF YOU & YOU FAIL!
c6gunner = "Run, Forrest: RUN!!!
* c6gunner's LYING saying I did a MacOS X one - I haven't yet & c6gunner's LYING impersonating me hosts work vs. Intel CPU issues (spectre/meltdown).
APK
P.S.=> You say hosts = shit here https://slashdot.org/comments.... ?
FACTS: /.ers & security pros + RESULTS say DIFFERENT:
1st: /.ers https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments.... https://slashdot.org/comments....
2nd: SECURITY PROS https://slashdot.org/comments....
3rd: REAL RESULTS w/ hosts vs. threats https://slashdot.org/comments....
EAT YOUR WORDS!
Hopefully Microsoft can restart their version of DNT since they proved the other one was a lie
> Microsoft ... tried to represent the best interest of the users
How exactly is killing DNT in the best interest of the users?
What exactly did they accomplish that is in your best interest?
There was 0% chance that Google and all the other advertisers would stop tracking anyone by default. You can say they "should", fine whatever, that wasn't going to happen, not remotely possible.
What the advertisers had agreed to do was not track users who had explicitly chosen that, with the standard explicitly saying it cannot be the default for a general-purpose browser. Therefore by obscuring who had actively made that choice, the only effect of Microsoft's move was to hasten the death of DNT. I don't see how that's good for users.
Not that I feel DNT was ever a good idea or bound to succeed, but Microsoft basically abused the feature by opting everyone into it, with the obvious intent being to kill the feature before it could even be tested. It worked. And now people are defending their move while calling others lapdogs and such. So a fantastic marketing stunt for MS, in addition to killing a competitor's feature they didn't want.
For a long time I thought DNT was a browser-level control. Meaning when you turn it on, the browser won't send tracked info to the site. When I realized DNT simply declares that you don't wanna be tracked and it's still up to the site owners to honor your wishes... I thought I was a damn big waste of effort to create a feature that in fact misled millions of people.
Expecting Facebook and Google to honor your wish not to be tracked? Are you out of your phucking mind? They make money by tracking. If they are forced by the government not to track, they may as well fire all their employees and shutdown their businesses.
So.. I suppose this is a good day to come clean and admit that I'm one of the people who thought (and said) DNT is basically a good idea. I still do think it's a good idea .. or rather, it was. And while I can see you probably disagree with me, you've also put your finger on how we might come together (but see below, because we still might not).
We had to ask, before we could justify making demands. DNT was a way of asking.
And yes, Microsoft undermined it so that if you ran MSIE, then your browser said you were asking, even though you hadn't actually asked. But really, how many people run MSIE? (Even 5 years ago.) How responsible is Microsoft for the strategy of asking, ultimately failing? Even as a DNT proponent, I can't really throw a lot of blame on them, and I think their conscious effort to kill DNT isn't really why it failed. It might have played a role, but the bigger reason that asking failed, is that we were asking one of the most wretched hives of scum and villainy in the entire history of human civilization: the modern ad industry.
Anyway, though, asking did fail. But I'm glad we tried. Check off that box. We can now say we asked nicely and our request was ignored. Escalating the conflict is no longer unreasonable, and we have something to point to the next time the adversary says "trust us."
On the other side of the coin, though, there are some basic principles that I hope we protect, and I know these things are at risk, and it's one of the reasons I had hoped that maybe, just maybe, DNT would have worked:
I don't think a government should be able to tell people what they're allowed to do internally on their own computers and their own storage. If you don't like that people remember all the information that you constantly go out of your way to give them, then stop sending it! It's the sender's responsibility, not the receiver's.
I hope that any legislative approach is somehow based on the initial acquisition or later exchange of the information, but does not restrict in any way that people are allowed to remember what you tell them, think about it, and act upon their thoughts. And my computer is my agent, so I want this freedom from thoughtcrime extended to my computer. Now, you can regulate me passing the information to other people! I think we all knew that, eventually, every person (yes, you, reader) is going to lose some speech rights in the conflict of the people vs the ad industry (though they're commercial speech rights, so this is hardly unprecedented). But I'd rather we stick to limiting our freedom of speech, before we even consider limiting freedom of thought. And yes, that's how high I really think the stakes are and I don't think I'm overdramatizing it. This has all the potential to lead to DMCA-level of evil. (Another law where I'm not interacting with anyone else, but somehow the government wants to limit what I can internally do on my own computer.)
If you willingly send the info to me, I get to have it. And whatever laws you pass to prevent this, will be selectively enforced because you can't tell what someone is internally doing until you already violate their privacy by crawling into their brain/computer. As if we need more selectively-enforced laws. *sigh*
Regulate the exchange of information between different entities. And possibly regulate (if you must) the policies that result in the info being sent in the first place. Cross-domain requests should be disabled by default; sorry CDN users. Sorry, guy who loads jquery from somewhere else. I'm shocked that this might have to become law, but for whatever fucking reasons, our browsers still do a thing that we all know is bad. That should have been addressed before we even tried DNT.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
After all, registering your phone on the Do Not Call list has about the same effect.
even if it's just to make my point PERFECTLY CLEAR.
only as long as users meaningfully make the choice to not want to be tracked.
Changing defaults screwed this entire principle.
I don't see things quite this way; the whole approach is really weaselly to begin with. The ad industry knows full well that the majority of users don't have the information or knowledge to make this meaningful choice. It cynically intended to use the consumers' lack of information to profit from them, at the same time touting its virtuousness in providing this scam of a standard. When somebody - Microsoft in this case - takes a measure to protect users by default, the ad industry throws a hissy fit, and discards the whole standard. The very fact they were able to do this demonstrates how much of a lie the DNT standard was.
Let me suggest an analogy: a city's Thieves Guild objects to a new municipal ordinance that requires all new homes to have a lock. They propose a competing standard: citizens that are concerned about their possessions should put a sign on the lawn, saying "Please don't rob this house, Mr. Thief", and they promise they won't rob those houses, as long as there aren't very many of them around. Of course, most citizens don't know that the standard exists, and they don't put the signs up. When a home builder starts installing the sign on all new houses, some citizens - like the GP - accuse them of breaking the standard and forcing the poor Thieves Guild into ignoring signs and robbing houses anyway. They say home owners who really don't want to be robbed should instead make a meaningful choice and install the lawn signs themselves. Does this sound ok to you?
or, It puts the lotion in the basket?
'Do Not Track,' the Privacy Tool Used By Millions of People, Doesn't Do Anything
Who was ever foolish enough to think that it would? It's 100% voluntary with no teeth and no enforcement power whatsoever.
It was instantly seen as a scrumptious list of people who didn't want to be tracked, and therefore of immense value to spammers, marketers, government agencies, etc etc etc.
It's like a "Do Not Mug" list, where you publish your name and the amount of cash you have in your pocket, along with your home address.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
This "Standard" was stupid from day one.
Hell, I illustrated why it was stupid back in 2012 with a fairy tale story nonetheless.
The fact that it took 6 years for people to realize that it was stupid just affirms to me that either people are gullible idiots, or I can see the future.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
The user has made a clear statement that they do not wish to be tracked.
I use DNT even knowing it won't be honored. But I can sue them based on the lack of honoring. I have logs, I can't request my ISP's logs containing my browser fingerprints to show in court.
That's ridiculous. By the time Microsoft made that call, Internet Explorer had long since dropped to a minority browser even on Windows. MS was trying to gain a competitive edge.
They didn't "violate the standard". They tried to use it, and the major advertisers' "agreement" proved to be worth what we all knew from the get-go it would be worth, i.e. the square root of diddly fucking squat.
Found the incel.
They should be using the proper standard RFC 3514.
It needed to be killed. The standard was corrupted right from the start by the advertisers where they made it clear they would only honour it if it saw very little adoption. hence it was designed to prevent any real government regulation or a standard that they would not control as they had already said they would not honour peoples choices if those people were more than an insignificant percentage.
Oh I agree it was weaselly and had no teeth. What I'm saying is the original principle was palatable for the advertisers. That changed when it became opt out instead of opt in.
You said it yourself: "The ad industry knows full well that the majority of users don't have the information or knowledge to make this meaningful choice."
To say they thought their sponsored proposal was palatable was only true to the extent that they believed that if there was every any sort of wide-scale adoption they could always justify ignoring it by claiming it was the result stupid or manipulated people, so even though there were people who did make a meaningful choice, they too can be ignored. If DNT "failed" and they actual sought a meaningful measure for those who meaningful wanted to not be tracked, they would have proposed further updates to the standard to work out the kinks. Blatantly ignoring the second they could come up with an excuse--for those who ever respected it at all--makes it clear the purely optional enforcement was the key palatable part, not any consideration of actually respecting meaningful choice.
But those are strongly plural marked. Most people divide into two camps over this issue: is it worse to use "he" or "they" for an individual of unspecified gender? There are long traditions of both uses, but both cause semantic dissonance.
This is the sound of someone who can't process the idea of women looking at pictures of men who are much, much more attractive than he is.