Firefox Advances Do-Not-Track Technology 148
CowboyRobot writes "Despite strong advertising industry opposition, Mozilla is advancing plans to have the Firefox browser block, by default, many types of tracking used by numerous websites, and especially advertisers. 'We're trying to change the dynamic so that trackers behave better,' Brendan Eich, CTO of Firefox developer Mozilla, told The Washington Post. According to NetMarketShare, 21% of the world's computers run Firefox. Eich said the blocking technology, which is still being refined, will go live in the next few months. The blocking technology is based on that used by Apple's Safari browser, which blocks all third-party cookies. Advertisers use these types of cookies to track users across multiple websites. Mozilla's cookie-blocking efforts follow a Do Not Track capability being adopted by all major browsers. But the DNT effort stalled in November 2012, after advertisers stopped participating in the program, following Microsoft making DNT active by default in Internet Explorer 10. Advertisers wanted the feature to be not active by default."
Easy Peasy (Score:2)
NSA=false
Re:Easy Peasy (Score:5, Funny)
girlintraining advances do not track tech MOAR. (Score:5, Interesting)
I can update my 'do not track' tech even further. It's called Tor, and the more people who use it, the safer it becomes. Bonus: Comes with free tin foil hat, extended digital middle finger to pervasive electronic surveillance.
Captcha: Doesn't work on Slashdot, which hates Tor and has banned all the exit nodes. "Slashdot is a Dice Holdings, Inc. service." *cough*
But seriously; if they can't link you to an IP address (which let's face it: with all the DNT in the world, your IP is logged by your ISP and your ISP is only too happy to whore out your realworld identity for a few scheckles, and it's trivial to link all your activity now to you, whether you login or not, use cookies, or all the browser magic in the world.
The only tech that can help you right now is one that mixes in all your traffic into everyone else's so you can't mine the data.
Re:girlintraining advances do not track tech MOAR. (Score:5, Interesting)
Good idea. There's something interesting about Tor I didn't realize before reading the the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]:
Originally sponsored by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory ... As of 2012, 80% of the Tor Project's $2M annual budget comes from the United States government, with the Swedish government
Yet the NSA takes Tor as a "definitely track this". Fact is stranger than fiction.
Re: (Score:2)
"To Serve Man, ... It's a Cookbook!"
Re: (Score:2)
Captcha: Doesn't work on Slashdot, which hates Tor and has banned all the exit nodes. "Slashdot is a Dice Holdings, Inc. service." *cough*
That's a very strange captcha.
Re: (Score:1)
Doesn't work on Slashdot, which hates Tor and has banned all the exit nodes.
See, that's the problem with TOR. It can't hide its exits nodes and blend in with all the other traffic. An exit node shouldn't look any different than any other http(s) request.
Re: (Score:2)
See, that's the problem with TOR. It can't hide its exits nodes and blend in with all the other traffic. An exit node shouldn't look any different than any other http(s) request.
See, that's the problem with Internet. It can't hide its gateways and blend in with all the other traffic. A gateway shouldn't look any different than any other.
-_- Dude, this isn't a problem with Tor. It's a problem with certain for-profit companies that hate anonymity. An exit node contains a sampling of all the Tor traffic in aggregate. Sure, the exit nodes are published... but so are your ISP's BGP routes. The difference is that unlike your ISP's traffic, which has your IP address tacked to every reques
Re: (Score:1)
It's a problem with certain for-profit companies that hate anonymity.
It's not just for-profit, I've banned all exit nodes on several non-profit community sites, because all TOR-traffic was bad traffic nobody wants.
Re: (Score:2)
"See, that's the problem with Internet. It can't hide its gateways and blend in with all the other traffic. A gateway shouldn't look any different than any other."
Yes, it IS a problem with Tor. It CAN'T hide the exit nodes. The most well established of them are closely watched by government.
There are only a couple of answers to that, and preferably a combination of both: lots more exit nodes, or switching them on and off randomly. Lots and lots more exit nodes that are switched on and off randomly would be best.
The whole concept of Tor relies on exit nodes not being easily monitored. Easy or not, the government has been monitoring them. So make it not worth the
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"It's called Tor, and the more people who use it, the safer it becomes."
There's a potential problem with that. [slashdot.org]
While it is true that the more people who use it (or more accurately, the more people who host exit-nodes) the better, as it stands the government has been singling out those who use privacy-enhancing technologies, like Tor and encryption.
Bad, BAD Government! (Seriously, it IS bad. It's an attack on the whole "right to communicate privately" concept.)
Having said all that, the more people who use these technologies the better. I particularly recommend Tor [torproject.org] and O [oneswarm.org]
Re: (Score:2)
As much as I hate the Dice Holdings situation, Slashdot has banned Tor since long long before Dice bought them. At least as early as 2005, Slashdot was not allowing logins or posts from Tor exit nodes.
Slashdot (the company) is about as luddite as a tech oriented site can get.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: girlintraining advances do not track tech MOAR (Score:5, Informative)
In Canada at least, Tor is awful. Because others can use your connection as well, if someone looks at child porn from behind your connection, you are guilty of distribution.
I suppose if you're dumb enough to disregard the gratuitous warnings on the download page, the application itself, the configuration file, the manual, and every internet site that offers a 'how to', all of which lay out in explicit detail what an exit node is, and why enabling one on your personal home internet connection is very bad, then you deserve a punch in the face. But you won't go to jail over it. Not even in Canada... no more than running an open wifi will. And yes, that's been to court. And yes, the guy shit bricks. But he was found guilty only of criminal stupidity.
The correct way to configure Tor in a way that helps everyone and avoids this problem is to set it up as a relay, thus any traffic that comes and goes through your system is encrypted, there is no way for you (or anyone else) to tell what its contents are, and stays within the Tor network.
But by all means, we should all just give in to having our privacy violated by corporations, governments, and anyone with slightly more technical finesse than this Anonymous Coward does... all because a very tiny fraction of the population wants to look at child porn/terrorist websites/whatever is politically unpopular this week.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
There are alternatives where the TOR traffic is clearly not related to the user who set up the exit node. One thing to come to mind is some Amazon cloud program thing that acted as an exit node. I think it was that, anyway, I didn't pay much attention to it.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
LOL, so your traffic will go in a perpetual loop around the world with no where to get out. Reminds me of the X.25 days...
Re: (Score:2)
Or you browse .onion hidden services only. Much more secure, if somewhat limited. There are .onion gateways to other anonymous nets like I2P as well, and vice versa.
Unilateral and therefore doomed (Score:1)
This will simply not work - it's a technical solution to a social problem (the article mentions the oligopoly currently in place). It's also a technical solution implemented unilaterally by Mozilla.
As the summary mentions: the original Do-Not-Track effort only failed when Microsoft made the boneheaded, unilateral decision to make it the default. Starting out this way will only start an arms race between Mozilla and advertisers.
Re: (Score:2)
The problem was there from the start. Do-Not-Track is built on the premise that most users won't know about it. Only those who have enough knowledge about the situation will go to the preferences and turn it on.
What we should have is legislation which says that you are not allowed to track unless a Do-Track header exists and is set to true. Let people opt in to tracking and see how many will do it. And if it's that important that you are able to track your visitors then by all mans check that the header is
Re: (Score:1)
When the social problem (spying on people in order to improve the mind control that is advertising) is an abuse of technology (cookies, Javascript), a technical solution can be appropriate.
Re: (Score:3)
"This will simply not work - it's a technical solution to a social problem (the article mentions the oligopoly currently in place). It's also a technical solution implemented unilaterally by Mozilla."
Nonsense on both counts.
It is not a "social problem". It's a corporate and government abuse problem. Those are 2 very different things.
And it's not implemented only by Mozilla. Safari has had the feature for a while, and there have been plug-ins that do this available on various browsers for at least a couple of years.
Further, Firefox has had a setting to turn off 3rd Party Cookies for a long time now. It's just not turned on by default (yet), but most people with half a brain use it. The other pro
Re: (Score:2)
IE has also been able to block third-party cookies (for longer than Firefox has even existed). The capability for this is nothing new.
Re: (Score:2)
the original Do-Not-Track effort only failed when Microsoft made the boneheaded, unilateral decision to make it the default.
Please stop regurgitating this propaganda from Apache that MS did anything wrong. Microsoft did not make DNT1 the default, they recommended it to their users by default, during the first-use setup. The user still chose whether to accept the recommendations, decline (which left DNT null), or customise the settings.
The ad industry (and hence Apache) were never going to honour DNT once enough people knew about it. The IE10 episode merely demonstrated that. It didn't make any difference how MS presented it to u
Re: (Score:2)
Which is why we need legislation that says that they should.
Standard Mozilla Profile (Score:1)
Can we get a standard profile to defeat this form of tracking:
https://panopticlick.eff.org/
(browser profiling, unique in my case to at least 1 in 2.5 million, and thus able to identify one person behind a session based NAT out of 2.5 million others).
Also first-time-exchange public keys for Thunderbird. There's a lot of things in privacy that Mozilla can do, that Google and others won't.
Re: (Score:2)
Using NoScript helps reduce the amount of profiling information you leak. Granted, the fact that javascript is disabled is also a distinguishing itentifier but it plugs up more holes than it creates.
Not technology (Score:2)
Neither sending a DNT request, nor compiling a list of known trackers requires any new technology. Blocking third-party cookies is relatively efficient already, but doesn't work when the site collaborates with the advertisers to track you. Coming up with a solution to that would be actual development.
Making some settings default is simply a business decision, and a bad one at that. Users who don't take the trouble of changing a few settings probably don't care much about their privacy.
Good. Make them Squirm (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
By default it is turned on. The web server software is opt in. Advertisers quickly threatened Apache and gave patches and they caved in. So again they win and decide for us
Re: (Score:2)
What will happen is that advertisers will implement systems to collect data with cooperation from site operators to eliminate the need for 3rd party cookies.
Re: (Score:2)
Do Not Track was silly, being opt-in and so on. And, surprise surprise, advertisers backed out when it started getting turned on by default. Now a fire is lit under their hindquarters since Firefox and Safari (and hopefully others) will simply do away with third party cookie support altogether. Taking away an advertiser's tracking tools is the best way to fight.
Exactly. This is no different than the police handing out "Do Not Rob" stickers to tourists, imagining that if few enough people put it on, then the thieves would spare those in return for the police focusing less effort to catch them. Anyone with half a brain will realize every tourist will put on the stickers, thus immediately making it totally pointless.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes surprise surprise people stopped supporting an opt-in system by design when it became opt-out.
Advertisers supported it when it represented consumer preference. It no longer does. You can thank one company in an attempt at standing up for your privacy in a way that only a marketing department could think of, they have effectively made privacy worse for everyone.
But hey we shouldn't expect any improvements in any experience we get from Microsoft.
Re: (Score:2)
Some... idiots.
Leaving aside the entire point that you're making a really stupid argument ("the whole point of a privacy feature is that it not be active by default..." WTF??) you're also flat-out wrong.
Fact: IE does not enable DNT by default. If you dismiss the first-run dialog (not the same as clicking the "enable this enumerated list of configuration options" button) it will not send DNT.
Fact: Right below the "enable this enumerated list of configuration options" (which of course includes the DNT option)
Apache will disable it (Score:1)
They already disabled IE10s dnt. I was surprised by the la k of outrage here but people defended the advertisers who fund apache as they hate ms more than Apache caving in to advertisers
Some sites block... (Score:2)
.
Target needs to re-evaluate their purpose for having a website - do they want to use the website to place cookies on peoples' disks? Or does target want to use the website t
Re: (Score:2)
Target needs to re-evaluate their purpose for having a website - do they want to use the website to place cookies on peoples' disks? Or does target want to use the website to sell merchandise?
Clearly, Target wants to track the users to whom they sell merchandise so they can sell them more merchandise. These aren't conflicting goals, unless users actually refuse to use Target's web site because they don't want to be tracked. But hardly any users refuse, so the net value to Target favors tracking. I'm sure Target has carefully evaluated the situation, and the result is the decisions they've made.
Re: (Score:2)
unless users actually refuse to use Target's web site because they don't want to be tracked.
Target's website refuses entry for those customers who do not have tracking cookies enabled. It is Target's choice, not the customers'.
I'm sure Target has carefully evaluated the situation, and the result is the decisions they've made.
Yeah, preventing customers from walking through the main entrance and buy things is always a good thing for a store to do.
Re: (Score:2)
unless users actually refuse to use Target's web site because they don't want to be tracked.
Target's website refuses entry for those customers who do not have tracking cookies enabled. It is Target's choice, not the customers'.
It's the customers' choice to enable cookies.
I'm sure Target has carefully evaluated the situation, and the result is the decisions they've made.
Yeah, preventing customers from walking through the main entrance and buy things is always a good thing for a store to do.
Sure it is, if it allows the store to profit even more from those who do come in. Are you also going to tell me that Costco is foolish for refusing entry to non-members?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Simple solution: do not use Target's website
Target has already made that decision for me --- they do not allow me to use their website.
Re: (Score:2)
don't shop at their store either. vote with your dollars and your feet...
Re: (Score:1)
Or use it, then delete the cookies. You are allowing only session cookies except for a handful of sites, right? Restart your browser, cookies go away.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
I recommend configuring your browser to keep cookies only until you close your browser. This is quite easy to do in Firefox - go to the options, in the Privacy tab, and under the checkbox for whether to accept cookies there's a dropdown labelled "Keep until:". Set that to "Keep until: I close Firefox". Then you can grab something like Cookie Monster [mozilla.org] to make it easy to whitelist those site where you do want persistent cookies. Which browser are you using, by the way?
Re: (Score:2)
FWIW, IE offers a different take on this: block third-party *requests* from sites you don't like/don't trust/are on EasyList (yes, EasyList for AdBlock Plus also publishes their block list for IE, as do many other such lists). I don't hugely care if a site wants to set a cookie on my browser, so long as they can't retrieve that cookie when I'm on any other sites.
It also breaks that stupid "X of your friends of Facebook liked this! ::THUMBSUP:: if you do too!" thing that a bunch of sites use; the request fro
Re: (Score:2)
Now that's interesting - I didn't know about IE9's tracking protection, or that it let you subscribe to blocklists. Thanks for sharing.
Start with (Score:3)
Every domain name needs to be fully isolated from each other. This includes blocking link referrers (that misspelled Referer header), as well as cookies, that provide any info to one domain about another. So if you click on a link that takes you to another site, it should NOT include the Referer header at all, unless you opt in to that (which should allow opt-ing per domain).
Re: (Score:2)
Think this through, for a moment.
The advertiser and content provider are working together. The content provider wants ads on their site, and they want you to click on those ads, because the advertiser makes money, and shares that money with the content provider. The two parties have an incentive to cooperate. Both parties want those ads to be relevant to you, because that increases the chances you'll click on them.
Today, if you are known to the advertiser, but unknown to the content provider, you get sho
Whitelist all (Score:2)
By default, a browser should not give a referrer, unless explicitly told to do so. Eg. RefControl for Firefox.
By default, a browser should not accept cookies, unless explicitly told to do so. Eg. CookieMonster for Firefox.
By default, a browser should not execute scripts or run plugins unless explicitly told to do so. Eg. NoScript for Firefox.
By default, a browser should not provide the info panopticlick [eff.org] obtains, such as the detailed user agent. That should be outright blank or generic and immutable from now
Interesting Topic considering that on Slashdot (Score:2)
According to my Ghostery window right now for this page. I have blocked:
Three Double Clicks.
One Google Adwords
One Google Analytics
One Scorecard Beacon
and Four Jainrain
Anybody ever try it on Weather.com or CNN.com? Everybody is into tracking..
All on one site, faster download (Score:2)
Go Firefox! (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
So when's the backlash coming against them like with IE?
Why would there be?
I see this as a good thing.
I only back lash against IE that I know of was that it was for years very insecure and didn't follow WWW standards. Now, IE is pretty nice browser - I still prefer Firefox for various personal quirks, though.
Re: (Score:2)
Heres the difference, and its really not so complicated.
IE announced that it was going to turn on the "please dont track me" flag which requests a website not track the browser. Such a setting only has an effect if the website in question honors it. Websites might honor that request if it was clear that the user intentionally turned it on, indicating that they perhaps cared enough to not visit said site or use an adblocker if it was not honored. By making it the default setting, it is not farfetched to t
Re:Backlash (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is as it should be.
The website owners and advertises screwed things up for themselves by setting up a system that made it virtually impossible for people browsing the web to opt out. So, measures like this became necessary. At this point, you have to go to extremes if you don't want to be tracked, and there is no informed consent for most people, you have to be constantly following their methods if you wish to opt out. And do things like blocking 3rd party cookies, javascript, flash, constantly clearing your cache etc.
I'd rather that Mozilla not need to do this, but it's abundantly clear that the advertising industry will not stop of its own accord. We people that browse the web didn't start this war, the advertisers did, and until we get a consistent way of opting into all this tracking, this kind of method is going to be necessary.
Re: (Score:3)
The website owners and advertises screwed things up for themselves by setting up a system that made it virtually impossible for people browsing the web to opt out
Some clarification is necessary, for folks who dont really get how websites work.
You are going to www.somesite.com and saying "please, server, send me whatever data you have published". That site may be publishing a website with content from a bunch of advertising networks, so thats what your request gets. Theres nothing inherently evil about this, as a lot of the time those ads generate the revenue which pays the server bills. DNT is your browser saying "please send me whatever youre publishing, but try
Re: (Score:2)
Sending whatever data you have published is not the same thing as giving permission to send my data to third parties.
I cannot conceive of how you would even think that the two are the same thing. Ads are fine, I understand that free things need to be paid for in some fashion, but targeted ads based upon tracking information are not the only way to go. Ads existed prior to targeting and tracking and commercial bandwidth costs less now than it did before tracking techniques were available.
If they need to trac
Re: (Score:2)
"Some clarification is necessary, for folks who dont really get how websites work."
Agree with hedwards. It seems that maybe you are the one who needs education.
This whole thing isn't about the site you visit. It's about 3rd parties tracking you when you visit those sites.
Here's how it works: you are person or company hosting website A. I am advertising company B. You create a website. On that website you include a link to an ad that is hosted on my server. Often they are buried in a mess of javascript, but in the simplest case that's what it amounts to.
When user X goes to your we
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps I wasnt clear enough. When you request data from a website's server, the response often includes pointers to data not hosted on that server. Sometimes it is images, sometimes JS (ie, google analytics, or discus, or SSO). Sometimes those pointers pull in ad data. But all of it was done with the explicit approval of the site owner, who you requested data from; and unless you are using DNT, your request was explicitly that that website give you everything that it had published, 3rd-party data and a
Re: (Score:2)
"Yes, and ALL of those are on sites which gave their explicit OK. You are visiting a site which has explicitly included 3rd party data."
I understand. It seemed to me in your other comment as though you were referring to the end user, not the site owner.
But regardless, while the site owner has wittingly or otherwise, approved the 3rd-party content someone visiting the site does not know it is there in advance. So there is no informed consent on the part of the user. That was my point.
And this is why "opt-out" strategies cannot work effectively. First, you cannot know in advance what you want to opt out of. Second, finding where and how
Re: (Score:2)
What backlash? I and many others here found ourselves in the odd position of applauding something MS did.
Re: (Score:2)
Imagine that, paid shills objected to something adverse to their employer. That's not normally considered backlash.
Re: Backlash (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
I remember the article about MS implementing DNT by default. It was actually one of the few occasions around here where they got praised. Normally they're so anticonsumer rights they don't deserve it.
Funny what happens when you have competition. Google Chrome would become just as bad and evil if no competion were around. Same in Firefox. I was really worried a decade ago that MS would still own 90% of the market with IE 6 today, but glad Firefox was there to stop it.
Now we see a better browser
Re: (Score:1)
Microsoft's approach to DNT was especially terrible. It does nothing to stop tracking, but it does give advertisers a legal loophole where they can say "even though there was a DNT:1 request header that doesn't necessarily mean the user opted out of tracking".
It was MS giving me what I want, and the Apache Software Foundation siding with the advertisers against me. Don't try to spin it into something different.
Re: Backlash (Score:5, Insightful)
It was MS giving me what I want, and the Apache Software Foundation siding with the advertisers against me. Don't try to spin it into something different.
No. It was Microsoft making your decision for you, making it entirely justifiable for advertisers to ignore the preference entirely since it doesn't represent your preference. And more likely it had squat to do with them championing privacy and more to do with screwing over Google and other advertisers.
I'm sure a browser could pose the question with some information the first time the browser is launched to make the preference an explicit user choice.
Re: (Score:2)
making it entirely justifiable for advertisers to ignore the preference entirely since it doesn't represent your preference
This is like saying "you were hit by a car but we left you to bleed to death by the side of the road because you didn't express your preference to be scooped up and taken to hospital". No-one wants to be tracked, everyone wants privacy.
I suppose MS could have just asked the question up-front when installing IE 10, like they ask about default search engines and that kind of stuff, but I imagine the advertisers would still have had a hissy fit. They were fine with it as long as only the minority who also run
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, and?
When we're talking about what someone else's computer internally does with the information you choose to send to it, they liter-- uh -- analogously do have the right (and more importantly: the POWER, even if you disagree about the right) to get away with away with the attitude that you just described. If it helps, thi
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe I'm naive, but I don't care about being tracked so I can be served useful ads. As a choice between seeing useful ads and non useful ones, I'd prefer to see useful ones. Remind me again why I should care?
Re: (Score:2)
I don't care about being tracked so I can be served useful ads. As a choice between seeing useful ads and non useful ones, I'd prefer to see useful ones. Remind me again why I should care?
Sounds like you do care - you care that you should receive ads useful to yourself.
That is why there should be a choice. You will choose tracking, fine. I will refuse it.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
As opposed to the advertisers opting you in without your consent? All MS was doing there was making sure that people had to opt in, rather than being tracked by god only knows whom all over the net, without any particular way of knowing who was doing it.
Re: (Score:2)
WOW can MS ever be the good guys here on slashdot I mean ever??
They can cure cancer and someone will bash them and find a reason it seems.
No MS never caved in. Apache did as greedy companies like Godaddy and Rackspace threatened they would go with IIS or some other web serving software if they didn't try to stomp on the will of the consumers immediately!! The standards bullshit is just that. The coders who patched it worked for advertising companies that contributed and the ISP market felt threatened custom
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Go google past news stories last year?
Yes Apache ignores DNT by default even if the user/browser requests it. Apache claimed its users were in an uproar! Its users being advertisers, ISPs, and others. Godaddy uses Apache as well and many felt without ads the demand for hosting sites would go down and threatened to cut funding if Apache didn't ignore DNT in future releases.
TO me that is the most atrocious of all. You need to hack and edit config or .h files in the source code to get it to even respect the st
Re: (Score:2)
Um... BULLSHIT.
There's a dialog in IE10 on first run that asks you, among other things, whether you want to enable DNT. It's true that Microsoft made DNT the recommended setting (meaning, if the user selects "give me the recommended settings", it will be enabled), but the user is informed what those recommended settings are beforehand, and they don't have to accept them. Microsoft they certainly didn't make the decision for you. Grow the fuck up.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm sure a browser could pose the question with some information the first time the browser is launched to make the preference an explicit user choice.
that's exactly what happens when you install/update ie. it tells you its going to set some settings, and it mentions setting do not track to on. and then you can click yes, or you can customize.
Re: (Score:2)
I expect Apache "sided" with advertisers is because they recognized the brokenness of a privacy set
Re: (Score:1)
Re: Backlash (Score:4, Interesting)
Indeed, considering the various sociopathic methods that advertisers are willing to enact to get their message heard, regardless of whether the end user wants to hear it, I say fuck them. The DNT wouldn't be necessary if they were satisfied with an opt in set up or we had any idea as to who the people doing the tracking were. But, that isn't the case.
They've given us malware in ad banners that use code hosted on 3rd party sites, those annoying flash ads that cover content and randomly crash, the intellitext that randomly disrupts our browsing and not to mention those hidden ads that get activated when you click on seemingly blank space on a site.
I'd personally suggest that they made their bed, and now it's time for them to lie in it. But, I think they might take that as permission to lie to me if they're actually in bed.
Re: (Score:1)
You wanted to lose the ability to opt out of tracking?
This is how DNT works normally
DNT:0 indicates that the user has consented to tracking
DNT:null does not indicate whether or not the user has consented
DNT:1 indicates that the user has opted out
Now on IE10 DNT:1 behaves like DNT:null, DNT:null is effectively DNT:0 and there is no way left to actually request not to be tracked.
I wanted to default to not being tracked. The sites choosing not to honor the setting are the ones who are against me. They are the ones who violate the protocol.
So I will continue to use other means to not even fetch their content in the first place. Sites carrying their ads get no revenue. Clients buying ad space on their network get no impressions. I get faster, safer browsing.
Re: (Score:2)
That's the thing. We'd all like not to be tracked. Well, most of us, at least. However DNT does not control whether or not you are tracked - it merely conveys whether the user has specifically asked not to be tracked (or to be tracked, in the case of DNT: 0). This is useful because it is a necessary component in other means to stop tracking. For example, some countries might manage to get a law passed forbidding tracking unless the user has opted in, in which case a DNT:0 request header could be a convenien
Re: (Score:2)
Bull fucking shit. The user is given the chance to look over the defaults and answer either "yes" or "no" when asked if everything looks okay before even using the browser for the first time. Nothing is stopping them from clicking "no" and choosing to click the button saying, "yes, please tell all the scummy cocksucking advertising companies out there to monitor everything I do on the Internet while using my computer." Preferably with a very descriptive paragraph of what they really do and what they use it
Re: (Score:2)
Advertisers make their living on loopholes and weasel words. They would have said that no matter what.
The simple fact, whether they like it or not, is that a great many people find being tagged and tracked like animals by a creepy corporate stalker to be distasteful in the extreme. Of the rest, practically none actually think being tracked is cool and even less would object to DNT being set.
The purpose of default settings is to make the vast majority happy enough. And that dictates setting DNT.
Frankly, even
Re: (Score:2)
The open source philosophy*, apparently:
*Note: I use quite a lot of open source software, and have contributed to a few projects and published a couple of my own. I do it pragmatically, not out of zealotry, though.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, the advertisers could market their own browser that explicitly tracks and will not block ads.
How well do you think that would do Mr Advertiser?
Re: (Score:2)
Chrome
Re: (Score:2)
Ha, indeed. Too bad I already moderated here.
There was a thread in the discussion of Microsoft's YouTube app (for WP8) not showing ads. Some fool suggested that Google update Chrome to block all Microsoft ads, and see how they like it. The problem is, the slice of Microsoft's income that comes from ads is smaller than the (tiny) slice of Google's income that *doesn't* come from ads. If Google did what that airhead had suggested, Microsoft would simply have resonded in kind... which would have been a huge bl
Re: (Score:2)
Safari blocks third party cookies by default, but they don't set DNT header unless you say so.
Re: (Score:2)
And then you have to enable the develop menu in the preferences, then go to the develop menu & select 'Send Do Not Track HTTP Header'
Re: (Score:2)
No it's in the regular preferences. Under Privacy, Website tracking. Select the checkbox right next to "Ask websites not to track me."
Re: (Score:1)
Safari is used as the default on the 18 kajillion iPhones and iPads out there.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's the tyranny of the default. Most people don't know about it.
It's the same reason why advertisers want DNT to be off by default, because most users don't know that they can opt out.
Re: (Score:2)
This is why man has crated the Tor Browser
An apt typo. You cannot know whether the exit node is dead or alive until you get results, and must treat it as both.
Re: (Score:2)