'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.)

Comments

Microsoft killed any hope by violating the standar

[raymorris]

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.

Re:Microsoft killed any hope by violating the stan

[ChatHuant]

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.

Re:sunscreen

[jeremyp]

If you follow the links, it tells you.

1. Most people don't apply it properly - you have to spray it on and then rub it in which negates the point somewhat.

2. A lot of it gets wasted.

3. While sun screen chemicals are known to be safe when applied to the skin, the situation is less certain about what happens if they are inhaled, which is more or less impossible to avoid when using spray on sun screen.

On the other hand, it is better than using no sun screen at all.