
F.T.C. Online Privacy Plan Seeks ‘Do Not Track’ Option - robg
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/02/business/media/02privacy.html?hp
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gyardley
User tracking is so essential to business optimization and ad targeting that
the FTC's initiatives can only backfire.

Today, the analytics and advertising industries increasingly self-regulate,
cookie-based opt-outs are usually available, and concerned users can quite
effectively opt-out through technical means. Should the FTC or Congress
mandate opt-in or even a broadly promoted 'do not track' list, companies will
quickly protect their revenues by making opt-in mandatory for content access -
and the opt-in that's required will likely be a whole lot more intrusive than
the relatively benign tracking that takes place today.

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d4rt
Beef Taco is a Firefox extension designed to opt out of tracking cookies.

<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/180650/>

I think it's an acceptable compromise to use such an extension.

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pierrefar
How would they track which people chose not to be tracked?

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harshpotatoes
I briefly scanned the pdf report linked by the new york times, and it seems
that one of the ftc's ideas is to basically make the private browsing option
available in more browsers, a bigger, bolder and more obvious button, and also
probably the default option.

So, I think if they were to follow through with this plan, they probably
wouldn't deal with lists or anything, but would have each browser send a blip
to the website saying the user is opted in.

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hammock
Is the only way the FTC could possibly enforce this to grab more power? to
check up on website administrators?

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earl
People can start by disabling 3rd party cookies in their browsers.

