Take a supposedly "anonymous" database, and chances are you will be able to compute the identity of each person whose information is recorded in that database. This is even more true when you take several "anonymous" databases in combination, and it is a certainty when you combine "anonymous" data with not-anonymous data.
When someone defends invasive advertising by claiming that the data is anonymized, you know they are either uninformed or lying.
If consumers REALLY cared about targeted ads, they wouldn't happily post every details of their lives on facebook.
Most people have no idea about what Facebook is collecting about that, which is part of the problem. Even highly educated people are shocked to learn about this:
It is the responsibility of browser makers to provide for user security. We cannot stop people from giving their information away voluntarily; we can include ABP or similar software in all browsers, and thus remove the incentive to create invasive advertising.
ABP is mandatory; DNT is just a distracting waste of time predicated on bad ideas about what Internet advertising should be (and for that matter, what the Internet itself should be). We solved the invasive web advertisement problem long ago with ABP, just like we solved the email / Usenet spam problem with spam filtering.
The first paragraph of TFA should be enough to know how uninformed the writer's opinion is: he pushes the idea that anonymous data is being collected, despite all the work that has shown how that data can be de-anonymized (especially when several "anonymous" databases are combined).
OK, here is a challenge for you: steal this post that I am writing. I will walk away from my computer for about 30 minutes to eat my lunch; let's see if you can steal the post by the time I get back.
Maybe they should think about using the methods employed by countries like Israel which actually work.
I know you were referring to airports, but another Israeli approach comes to mind when I think of the TSA: the approach to West Bank checkpoints. Read this:
Arbitrary policies set by inept guards who know nothing about the high level reasons for what they do? Random harassment at will? Punishments for daring to say "no" or for standing up for your own dignity? Guards that have no idea whether or not they actually picked the terrorists out of a crowd of non-terrorists?
This is what the TSA checkpoints are about. They are not trying to keep us safe from terrorists by humiliating us, punishing us for exercising our rights, or wasting our time and making us miss our flights. The checkpoints probably make us less safe, since we are standing in a neatly organized and easy-to-attack crowd before passing through. The goal is to attack our psychology, to remind us that the government can do whatever it wants and that we need to just go along with it if we do not want to suffer.
After all, metal detectors and X-ray images of your luggage are more than sufficient to convince people that you are doing "something" to keep them safe (most people probably never noticed the available of glass at airport bars, or the fact that people who charter private jets go through no security at all). The purpose of the humiliating practices of the TSA is to make sure that people stay in line and do as their government demands. Eventually the TSA will spread these practices beyond airports, to trains, subways, and buses, until almost everyone deals with it on a daily basis. Then the TSA will have won: they will have conquered American psychology.
You cannot steal ideas, writings, software, music, or movies, and no amount of copyright lobbyist Doublethink is going to change that (oh no, did I just steal a word from George Orwell?!). The entire case from TFA is about someone who dared to make copies of scientific articles and to share those copies with others -- what did he steal? When I entered graduate school, we were told that our research and dissertations would expand the body of human knowledge, not that we had to be careful about not letting too many people learn our results.
If the law says that Swartz is a criminal, then the law is so wrong, so far off course, so totally hijacked by an industry run by people who do not have a modicum of creativity that it should be ignored. Swartz did nothing wrong by sharing these articles, he did nothing wrong by obtaining them, and society would be a better place if people followed his example.
Im much more concerned with a generation that seems to favor some kind of anarchy where everyone decides for themselves which of the laws are worth following
Who thinks that? I don't see people breaking sensible laws, regardless of their age...
Oh, wait, you were referring to laws that are not sensible. Well what did you expect?
Here's the actual effect it has had - everyone gets to pay more for data since everyone has to be able to tether. The new mandatory shared data plans are more expensive than older piecemeal plans. WHat about people that didn't want to pay for tethering? Too bad.
This is where markets come in to play. Rather than increase regulation, I propose simplification: make free tethering mandatory for all carriers. Then the carriers can actually compete on price.
Of course, a healthy, competitive market would require another demonic government intervention: breaking up the cell monopolies. Heaven forbid...
If it gains widespread usage it will spark a programming arms race that we are unlikely to win.
We said the same about spam filtering, and yet spam is now down to manageable. I think we can do the same with annoying and intrusive web advertising.
The real question is not, "Can we win?" but rather, "Will browser makers actually try to win?" Unfortunately, the answer is probably, "No, because browsers are made by advertisers or by people who are in bed with advertisers."
For nerds, education is important. We are who we are because we love to learn. As intellectuals, nerds, and geeks, we benefit from anything that improves the state of education, and we suffer from anything that is detrimental to the state of education.
This is not even a word that should be spoken if we are talking about education. Education is not a business. If charter schools are doing a good job, that improves the situation for everyone, including public school teachers.
Can't the union accept private school teachers as members
The problem is that the union currently represents people whose jobs are threatened by privatization; a deal would first need to be reached that allowed public school teachers to be transferred to charter schools and visa versa, or else the union would have members fighting against each other. One of the issues in this strike was the number of teachers who were fired when schools were closed; a while back, a tentative deal was reached where the city would give those same teachers first consideration for new positions. The union has to represent the interests of its members, and that means ensuring that the members keep their jobs.
It is also hard to say what the fight to unionize privatized schools would look like. Unions had to fight hard in the early 20th century, and have been under constant attack since the 80s. I doubt privatized schools would be willing to work with a union, and they are likely hiring teachers who do not seem like the sort of people who would want to join a union (what do you think they look for in job interviews?).
I'm also curious what would stop the city from hiring scabs
Finding qualified teachers who are willing to work for Chicago's school system is probably not easy. The schools are being opened for half days that include lunch (most students qualify for free or reduced price lunch, and so they would potentially be starving without that service), although with the custodians threatening a solidarity strike that might not last.
What do you plan to base those evaluations on? How do you hope to ensure that the evaluations do not favor teachers who work in "safe" schools in middle class areas, where the students are being pushed by their parents to get high test scores and go to college, over teachers in "tough" schools where the parents are not so worried about education and where the students dream of becoming master criminals?
In other words, the plan where teachers who work in tough environments where students have not decided whether they want to graduate from high school or become criminals are punished. "Merit based" evaluations of teachers are not all they are cracked up to be; teachers cannot magically affect improvement if parents and cultures are not working with them. There is also the question of what basis is used for evaluations -- do you really think scores on tests show how well teachers are doing in their classrooms?
P2P infrastructure depends on peers wanting to connect to you. If you're seen as 'toxic' then noone will.
In the real world, once something has propagated far enough on a peer to peer system, it is basically impossible to remove. See, for example, alt.religion.scientology on Usenet, and the attempts by scientologists to remove the group, messages from the group, etc.
Until the human being has chosen to opt out, NULL is what the browser is supposed to send
Did you read what I said? If people do not know how pervasive tracking is, it should be opt-in, period.
Now with the MSIE change, they will have a valid excuse for ignoring the flag, and the scrutiny, and pressure to respect DNT will definitely end, result: DNT will become worthless, it will become a complete NOOP, everyone will be OPTED back in, per-site "opt out cookie-based schemes (and cookies that expire)" will again be the only way for users to express opt out intent, and the internet will be back in the same situation we were in before DNT had even been proposed.
There is another, better option, one which the trackers have a harder time defeating: ad blocking. Yes, you can still be tracked if you use ABP, but it is harder when you are not even getting the page elements that are used to track you. DNT is a waste of time and a distraction; advertisers can ignore it if they want, and they can do so without users being alerted to that fact.
Privacy protection is a security problem; how many other security problems have been solved by politely asking the adversary to stop their attack?
Maybe you're one of those rare birds who likes the idea of paying subscription fees or micro-transactions every time you want to look at a website, but most of us are happier with the occasional unobtrusive banner ad.
The 90s called, they want their web advertising back. In today's world, web ads are not unobtrusive, they are not remotely privacy-respecting, and they are bad for web users. That system needs to be stopped, and the sooner, the better.
Yes we do: ad blocking software. I would say that ad blocking software is as necessary for web browsing as spam filtering is for email. If website owners are hurting, let them demand impression-based ad revenue, let them serve ads from their own servers, and we can revisit the idea of not blocking ads.
The status Quo is everything is opt-in by default
Browser makers can change that. W3C can change that. We can make targeted advertising that is privacy-respecting by using PIR and similar protocols. The fact that we are not doing that shows how much we respect users of the web (and whose interests we really care about).
Ultimately, you're going to have to somehow pay yourself, if you want to see professional content providers' content without advertising.
Spoken like someone who has not yet graduated from the 1960s. The Internet is not a cable TV network. We can do things differently online, if we can evolve our concept of how worthwhile information is created. We can do things in a peer-to-peer fashion and take the cost of "broadcasting" out of the picture.
Except that we let the RIAA ruin all that.
Right now, the best we can hope for is incremental improvement
No, we have ad blocking software, so we can do better than incremental improvement. Let website owners find a way to monetize their sites without invading our privacy. They did not say "no" to the lack of respect for their users; they should lie in the bed they made, which should be the one where users and browser makes are revolting.
This is not a matter of incremental improvement, it is a matter of getting the respect we deserve. Unchecked databases on our browsing habits which store our personal information indefinitely are bad for us -- and if website owners do not care about that, why should we care about them?
Most popular web sites would not exist without advertising to pay the hosting bills and fund creation of content
Cry me a river -- those websites did not stand up for their users and say, "do not track our users," when they made deals with advertisers. They could have based their advertising revenue on impressions, serving the images from their own servers, and made enough money to pay the bills. Websites that were foolish enough to accept the advertising terms that led to this situation should accept the consequences of those decisions: ad blocking, annoyed users, and reduced revenue.
Turning DNT on by default, and making advertisers honor it, means most users will get badly targeted ads they are even less interested in.
If that annoys people, let them opt-in to targeted advertising. If people are not annoyed, it is because they never wanted the advertising to begin with.
Furthermore, if users do want targeted advertising, we can do that in a privacy-preserving way. Instead of talking about trusting advertisers to respect users who say, "Don't track me," let's talk about advertising that relies on private information retrieval, so that people can have their browsers track their history and fetch relevant ads in a privacy-preserving way. This is not some unheard-of technology -- PIR has been known for decades, it can be done in a highly efficient way, and it can give people ads they want to see. Yet nobody respects users enough to do this; this could have been added to HTML5 as a special "advertisement" tag, but it was not.
A lot of web content will not be created, or will move behind a paywall. Is that really a good thing?
If that would indeed happen, then the problem is not with ad blocking, DNT, or advertising; the problem is with the web itself. I doubt that this doomsday scenario would actually happen, but if it did, the appropriate response would be to return to peer to peer networking, so that "content" creators do not run up big bills (see, for example, famous posters on Usenet, who did not need to partner with advertisers or run up huge bandwidth bills). One of the great things about the Internet is that the model is not based on "creators" and "consumers" -- any node can send or receive data, and we are not bound to the "broadcasting" model that we see the web turning into (and which aligns more closely with cable and satellite TV networks).
Ads fund the vast majority of content people care about on the web. Spam does not. There is a large difference.
Perhaps, but I view these as security problems. With spam, we want to prevent unwanted messages from clogging out inboxes and possibly tricking users; with web tracking, we want to prevent our personal information from being amassed and stored indefinitely. Legal approaches, "play nice" approaches like DNT, etc. are generally bad ways to solve security problems.
Advertising is not necessarily a bad thing. When I needed a new couch, I went to one of the most successful advertising websites in the world: Craigslist. The difference is that Craigslist is not recording who my friends are, what my emails say, or where I read my news; Craigslist lets me search for the things I want, and lets people who have things to sell advertise through that search system. I am not sure if Craigslist can be used to monetize the web; I am not creative enough to see a way for Craigslist to add something to a site like Slashdot that would be productive for anyone. On the other hand, Slashdot could just display a static image with some brand on it, and by seeing that, the brand would be advertised to me.
When I refer to web advertisers, I refer to those that are tracking people, because that is what most web advertising is (Craigslist-style advertising is, sadly, not the bulk of advertising). These same companies also tried to push "pop ups," "pop under," and
Microsoft is planning on destroying the standard/convention by not implementing it properly in IE; e.g. by Default pretending that the user has opted out by supplying a DNT 1 value; instead of the user taking no preference.
This sounds like the right thing to me. If most users are unaware of how pervasive the tracking is these days, then it should be opt-in. Let people who at least know that there is something to opt in to make a decision about opting in.
Of course, then the web advertisers would just ignore DNT. Which is what will happen anyway.
The real answer is not to politely ask these companies to stop tracking us; what reason do they have to care about our wishes? The real answer is to make ABP a standard feature in browsers, with a whitelist option for users who actually want advertising (but which warns them that advertisers will track their browsing habits -- with clear, unambiguous, easy-to-understand wording). We made spam filtering a default for email, and then spam became manageable; we should make ad blocking the default for the web, until it is brought back down to reasonable levels.
I have no sympathy for web advertisers. They should be excluded from the debate, just like spammers were excluded.
Why are we trusting web servers to be honest? Advertising should be opt-in, not "opt-out, and then only if the server agrees to let you opt-out."
We didn't bring spam down to manageable levels by politely asking spammers not to send us email. We brought spam down to manageable levels by filtering it so that it did not even reach our inboxes. Why are we treating web advertising any differently?
Slashdot Mirror
Take a supposedly "anonymous" database, and chances are you will be able to compute the identity of each person whose information is recorded in that database. This is even more true when you take several "anonymous" databases in combination, and it is a certainty when you combine "anonymous" data with not-anonymous data.
When someone defends invasive advertising by claiming that the data is anonymized, you know they are either uninformed or lying.
If consumers REALLY cared about targeted ads, they wouldn't happily post every details of their lives on facebook.
Most people have no idea about what Facebook is collecting about that, which is part of the problem. Even highly educated people are shocked to learn about this:
http://www.switched.com/2009/09/21/gaydar-experiment-uses-facebook-to-find-your-sexual-orientatio/
It is the responsibility of browser makers to provide for user security. We cannot stop people from giving their information away voluntarily; we can include ABP or similar software in all browsers, and thus remove the incentive to create invasive advertising.
ABP is mandatory; DNT is just a distracting waste of time predicated on bad ideas about what Internet advertising should be (and for that matter, what the Internet itself should be). We solved the invasive web advertisement problem long ago with ABP, just like we solved the email / Usenet spam problem with spam filtering.
The first paragraph of TFA should be enough to know how uninformed the writer's opinion is: he pushes the idea that anonymous data is being collected, despite all the work that has shown how that data can be de-anonymized (especially when several "anonymous" databases are combined).
OK, here is a challenge for you: steal this post that I am writing. I will walk away from my computer for about 30 minutes to eat my lunch; let's see if you can steal the post by the time I get back.
Maybe they should think about using the methods employed by countries like Israel which actually work.
I know you were referring to airports, but another Israeli approach comes to mind when I think of the TSA: the approach to West Bank checkpoints. Read this:
http://www.bostonreview.net/BR37.4/oded_naaman_israeli_defense_forces_palestinians_occupation.php
Arbitrary policies set by inept guards who know nothing about the high level reasons for what they do? Random harassment at will? Punishments for daring to say "no" or for standing up for your own dignity? Guards that have no idea whether or not they actually picked the terrorists out of a crowd of non-terrorists?
This is what the TSA checkpoints are about. They are not trying to keep us safe from terrorists by humiliating us, punishing us for exercising our rights, or wasting our time and making us miss our flights. The checkpoints probably make us less safe, since we are standing in a neatly organized and easy-to-attack crowd before passing through. The goal is to attack our psychology, to remind us that the government can do whatever it wants and that we need to just go along with it if we do not want to suffer.
After all, metal detectors and X-ray images of your luggage are more than sufficient to convince people that you are doing "something" to keep them safe (most people probably never noticed the available of glass at airport bars, or the fact that people who charter private jets go through no security at all). The purpose of the humiliating practices of the TSA is to make sure that people stay in line and do as their government demands. Eventually the TSA will spread these practices beyond airports, to trains, subways, and buses, until almost everyone deals with it on a daily basis. Then the TSA will have won: they will have conquered American psychology.
You cannot steal ideas, writings, software, music, or movies, and no amount of copyright lobbyist Doublethink is going to change that (oh no, did I just steal a word from George Orwell?!). The entire case from TFA is about someone who dared to make copies of scientific articles and to share those copies with others -- what did he steal? When I entered graduate school, we were told that our research and dissertations would expand the body of human knowledge, not that we had to be careful about not letting too many people learn our results.
If the law says that Swartz is a criminal, then the law is so wrong, so far off course, so totally hijacked by an industry run by people who do not have a modicum of creativity that it should be ignored. Swartz did nothing wrong by sharing these articles, he did nothing wrong by obtaining them, and society would be a better place if people followed his example.
Here I was, thinking I agreed with you...
Im much more concerned with a generation that seems to favor some kind of anarchy where everyone decides for themselves which of the laws are worth following
Who thinks that? I don't see people breaking sensible laws, regardless of their age...
Oh, wait, you were referring to laws that are not sensible. Well what did you expect?
Knowledge?
Here's the actual effect it has had - everyone gets to pay more for data since everyone has to be able to tether. The new mandatory shared data plans are more expensive than older piecemeal plans. WHat about people that didn't want to pay for tethering? Too bad.
This is where markets come in to play. Rather than increase regulation, I propose simplification: make free tethering mandatory for all carriers. Then the carriers can actually compete on price.
Of course, a healthy, competitive market would require another demonic government intervention: breaking up the cell monopolies. Heaven forbid...
If it gains widespread usage it will spark a programming arms race that we are unlikely to win.
We said the same about spam filtering, and yet spam is now down to manageable. I think we can do the same with annoying and intrusive web advertising.
The real question is not, "Can we win?" but rather, "Will browser makers actually try to win?" Unfortunately, the answer is probably, "No, because browsers are made by advertisers or by people who are in bed with advertisers."
For nerds, education is important. We are who we are because we love to learn. As intellectuals, nerds, and geeks, we benefit from anything that improves the state of education, and we suffer from anything that is detrimental to the state of education.
competition
This is not even a word that should be spoken if we are talking about education. Education is not a business. If charter schools are doing a good job, that improves the situation for everyone, including public school teachers.
Can't the union accept private school teachers as members
The problem is that the union currently represents people whose jobs are threatened by privatization; a deal would first need to be reached that allowed public school teachers to be transferred to charter schools and visa versa, or else the union would have members fighting against each other. One of the issues in this strike was the number of teachers who were fired when schools were closed; a while back, a tentative deal was reached where the city would give those same teachers first consideration for new positions. The union has to represent the interests of its members, and that means ensuring that the members keep their jobs.
It is also hard to say what the fight to unionize privatized schools would look like. Unions had to fight hard in the early 20th century, and have been under constant attack since the 80s. I doubt privatized schools would be willing to work with a union, and they are likely hiring teachers who do not seem like the sort of people who would want to join a union (what do you think they look for in job interviews?).
I'm also curious what would stop the city from hiring scabs
Finding qualified teachers who are willing to work for Chicago's school system is probably not easy. The schools are being opened for half days that include lunch (most students qualify for free or reduced price lunch, and so they would potentially be starving without that service), although with the custodians threatening a solidarity strike that might not last.
Teacher evaluations are a must
What do you plan to base those evaluations on? How do you hope to ensure that the evaluations do not favor teachers who work in "safe" schools in middle class areas, where the students are being pushed by their parents to get high test scores and go to college, over teachers in "tough" schools where the parents are not so worried about education and where the students dream of becoming master criminals?
http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/story/14694941/special-report-youth-gangs-in-hawaii
What, did you think Hawaii was a special case because all the pictures show you a tropical paradise?
merit-based suggestions
In other words, the plan where teachers who work in tough environments where students have not decided whether they want to graduate from high school or become criminals are punished. "Merit based" evaluations of teachers are not all they are cracked up to be; teachers cannot magically affect improvement if parents and cultures are not working with them. There is also the question of what basis is used for evaluations -- do you really think scores on tests show how well teachers are doing in their classrooms?
P2P infrastructure depends on peers wanting to connect to you. If you're seen as 'toxic' then noone will.
In the real world, once something has propagated far enough on a peer to peer system, it is basically impossible to remove. See, for example, alt.religion.scientology on Usenet, and the attempts by scientologists to remove the group, messages from the group, etc.
Until the human being has chosen to opt out, NULL is what the browser is supposed to send
Did you read what I said? If people do not know how pervasive tracking is, it should be opt-in, period.
Now with the MSIE change, they will have a valid excuse for ignoring the flag, and the scrutiny, and pressure to respect DNT will definitely end, result: DNT will become worthless, it will become a complete NOOP, everyone will be OPTED back in, per-site "opt out cookie-based schemes (and cookies that expire)" will again be the only way for users to express opt out intent, and the internet will be back in the same situation we were in before DNT had even been proposed.
There is another, better option, one which the trackers have a harder time defeating: ad blocking. Yes, you can still be tracked if you use ABP, but it is harder when you are not even getting the page elements that are used to track you. DNT is a waste of time and a distraction; advertisers can ignore it if they want, and they can do so without users being alerted to that fact.
Privacy protection is a security problem; how many other security problems have been solved by politely asking the adversary to stop their attack?
Maybe you're one of those rare birds who likes the idea of paying subscription fees or micro-transactions every time you want to look at a website, but most of us are happier with the occasional unobtrusive banner ad.
The 90s called, they want their web advertising back. In today's world, web ads are not unobtrusive, they are not remotely privacy-respecting, and they are bad for web users. That system needs to be stopped, and the sooner, the better.
we don't have a choice
Yes we do: ad blocking software. I would say that ad blocking software is as necessary for web browsing as spam filtering is for email. If website owners are hurting, let them demand impression-based ad revenue, let them serve ads from their own servers, and we can revisit the idea of not blocking ads.
The status Quo is everything is opt-in by default
Browser makers can change that. W3C can change that. We can make targeted advertising that is privacy-respecting by using PIR and similar protocols. The fact that we are not doing that shows how much we respect users of the web (and whose interests we really care about).
Ultimately, you're going to have to somehow pay yourself, if you want to see professional content providers' content without advertising.
Spoken like someone who has not yet graduated from the 1960s. The Internet is not a cable TV network. We can do things differently online, if we can evolve our concept of how worthwhile information is created. We can do things in a peer-to-peer fashion and take the cost of "broadcasting" out of the picture.
Except that we let the RIAA ruin all that.
Right now, the best we can hope for is incremental improvement
No, we have ad blocking software, so we can do better than incremental improvement. Let website owners find a way to monetize their sites without invading our privacy. They did not say "no" to the lack of respect for their users; they should lie in the bed they made, which should be the one where users and browser makes are revolting.
This is not a matter of incremental improvement, it is a matter of getting the respect we deserve. Unchecked databases on our browsing habits which store our personal information indefinitely are bad for us -- and if website owners do not care about that, why should we care about them?
Most popular web sites would not exist without advertising to pay the hosting bills and fund creation of content
Cry me a river -- those websites did not stand up for their users and say, "do not track our users," when they made deals with advertisers. They could have based their advertising revenue on impressions, serving the images from their own servers, and made enough money to pay the bills. Websites that were foolish enough to accept the advertising terms that led to this situation should accept the consequences of those decisions: ad blocking, annoyed users, and reduced revenue.
Turning DNT on by default, and making advertisers honor it, means most users will get badly targeted ads they are even less interested in.
If that annoys people, let them opt-in to targeted advertising. If people are not annoyed, it is because they never wanted the advertising to begin with.
Furthermore, if users do want targeted advertising, we can do that in a privacy-preserving way. Instead of talking about trusting advertisers to respect users who say, "Don't track me," let's talk about advertising that relies on private information retrieval, so that people can have their browsers track their history and fetch relevant ads in a privacy-preserving way. This is not some unheard-of technology -- PIR has been known for decades, it can be done in a highly efficient way, and it can give people ads they want to see. Yet nobody respects users enough to do this; this could have been added to HTML5 as a special "advertisement" tag, but it was not.
A lot of web content will not be created, or will move behind a paywall. Is that really a good thing?
If that would indeed happen, then the problem is not with ad blocking, DNT, or advertising; the problem is with the web itself. I doubt that this doomsday scenario would actually happen, but if it did, the appropriate response would be to return to peer to peer networking, so that "content" creators do not run up big bills (see, for example, famous posters on Usenet, who did not need to partner with advertisers or run up huge bandwidth bills). One of the great things about the Internet is that the model is not based on "creators" and "consumers" -- any node can send or receive data, and we are not bound to the "broadcasting" model that we see the web turning into (and which aligns more closely with cable and satellite TV networks).
Ads fund the vast majority of content people care about on the web. Spam does not. There is a large difference.
Perhaps, but I view these as security problems. With spam, we want to prevent unwanted messages from clogging out inboxes and possibly tricking users; with web tracking, we want to prevent our personal information from being amassed and stored indefinitely. Legal approaches, "play nice" approaches like DNT, etc. are generally bad ways to solve security problems.
Advertising is not necessarily a bad thing. When I needed a new couch, I went to one of the most successful advertising websites in the world: Craigslist. The difference is that Craigslist is not recording who my friends are, what my emails say, or where I read my news; Craigslist lets me search for the things I want, and lets people who have things to sell advertise through that search system. I am not sure if Craigslist can be used to monetize the web; I am not creative enough to see a way for Craigslist to add something to a site like Slashdot that would be productive for anyone. On the other hand, Slashdot could just display a static image with some brand on it, and by seeing that, the brand would be advertised to me.
When I refer to web advertisers, I refer to those that are tracking people, because that is what most web advertising is (Craigslist-style advertising is, sadly, not the bulk of advertising). These same companies also tried to push "pop ups," "pop under," and
Microsoft is planning on destroying the standard/convention by not implementing it properly in IE; e.g. by Default pretending that the user has opted out by supplying a DNT 1 value; instead of the user taking no preference.
This sounds like the right thing to me. If most users are unaware of how pervasive the tracking is these days, then it should be opt-in. Let people who at least know that there is something to opt in to make a decision about opting in.
Of course, then the web advertisers would just ignore DNT. Which is what will happen anyway.
The real answer is not to politely ask these companies to stop tracking us; what reason do they have to care about our wishes? The real answer is to make ABP a standard feature in browsers, with a whitelist option for users who actually want advertising (but which warns them that advertisers will track their browsing habits -- with clear, unambiguous, easy-to-understand wording). We made spam filtering a default for email, and then spam became manageable; we should make ad blocking the default for the web, until it is brought back down to reasonable levels.
I have no sympathy for web advertisers. They should be excluded from the debate, just like spammers were excluded.
Why are we trusting web servers to be honest? Advertising should be opt-in, not "opt-out, and then only if the server agrees to let you opt-out."
We didn't bring spam down to manageable levels by politely asking spammers not to send us email. We brought spam down to manageable levels by filtering it so that it did not even reach our inboxes. Why are we treating web advertising any differently?
They may look evil, but hardly anyone cares. Do you really think Facebook will see a mass revolt if it ignores DNT?