
Safari to join "Do Not Track" crowd, leaving Google behind - shawndumas
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/04/safari-to-gain-do-not-track-support-in-lion.ars
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diego_moita
Oh, the irony!

Ghostery reports 3 tracker javascript frameworks in the link refered by this
post: Lotame, Comscore Beacon and (guess what?) Google Analytics.

For those interested in privacy I'd recommend: <http://www.ghostery.com/>. It
has protection for a lot of trackers in most web-browsers.

~~~
pavs
"Irony" is not what you think it is.

~~~
Joakal
How about Ghostery themselves providing services to the advertisement
industry? [0]

[0] <http://www.ghostery.com/faq> (Last paragraph)

~~~
taylorbuley
Interesting. So Ghostery users appear to opt-in to being tracked, then
Ghostery shares that information with others.

[http://news.ghostery.com/2011/03/04/ghostery-helps-the-
bbb-t...](http://news.ghostery.com/2011/03/04/ghostery-helps-the-bbb-track-
the-trackers/)

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eli
DNT seems like a pretty crappy solution.

I think a lot of people will enable DNT not realizing they'll get exactly the
same number of ads, just less relevant. And the web marketing companies who
are doing evil things will just ignore the header.

~~~
asadotzler
DNT is not about blocking ads. It's about signaling that you don't want to be
profiled for advertising purposes. If you don't mind being profiled for
targeted ads, then don't flip the switch.

~~~
eli
I know, that's what I said.

But if you really don't want to be tracked, can you trust marketers to respect
this header? If not, what's the point?

~~~
bad_user
The point is that some marketers are still honest and some also realize that
it's smart to not piss off people, but there's no easy to use flagging
mechanism that would signal your disapproval without user-experience suffering
badly.

Also, some marketers might be honest, but that data may end-up in the wrong
hands eventually. So if you care about privacy, any period of time in which
you aren't tracked is a net win for your privacy.

Not to mention that this flag may end up being a useful argument in case of a
lawsuit.

~~~
spoondan
_The point is that some marketers are still honest_

So DNT is a mechanism for blocking the honest marketers that we trust to
respect our communicated wishes, while still permitting the dishonest
marketers to do what they will? As far as I can tell, DNT requires enforcement
legislation to be effective.

 _some also realize that it's smart to not piss off people_

How would someone tell that an advertiser is not respecting DNT and therefore
be pissed off? Looking for suspicious cookies from third-party sites? The ads
seem too personalized?

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emehrkay
I need this. I never really cared about ads and them showing up on websites, I
dont mind if that is the way that the site makes its money. However, about two
months ago I got a flyer in the mail for a local dentist, so I went to their
website. Now every site that I go to has that dentist as the ad and I cannot
figure out how to clear cookies/cache whatever to change it (it only happens
on my laptop in a certain browser). Anyway, I welcome "do not track" and will
definitely use it.

~~~
nostromo
It's common now for ad networks to use "Flash cookies" -- meaning if you clear
your cookies, they will just recreate them next time you hit their server
using a cookie stored by Flash.

Remove them here:
[http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplay...](http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager07.html)

Be sure to delete both Flash and normal cookies at the same time, since if one
is present and the other is not, they will recreate each other. Better yet,
use FlashBlock.

~~~
w01fe
That's a start, but there are many other potential vectors for cookie data.
See: <http://samy.pl/evercookie/>

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joe_the_user
What I'd like is an implementation which simply allows each browser window/tab
to be absolutely segregated from each other one + a "clear all cookies"
button/menu-option.

What's so hard about that?

~~~
modeless
What browser these days doesn't have a "clear all cookies" option? You can
even browse in private mode and have your cookies cleared automatically.
Chrome is working on multiple profile support: <http://www.chromium.org/user-
experience/multi-profiles>

~~~
Groxx
That's good to know (you can manage currently by changing where one version
stores its data - I run stable, beta, and dev simultaneously this way). But it
looks like that's not per-window / per-tab, but instead an application-wide
setting. Or, the screenshots imply that to me (OSX especially). And multiple
_profiles_ , even at the same time, isn't the same as multiple _sessions_.

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rhizome
Some of the webserver log analysis tools I use, Analog and Visitors among
them, show huge, huge discrepancies in numbers culled from the actual logs vs.
what Google Analytics shows me. By that token I have concluded that people are
already pretty successful at evading GA tracking to a large degree, though
probably not to supercookie levels.

~~~
46Bit
If you mean the raw server requests, a lot of that will come from bots/etc
without a javascript engine. Blocking GA is probably a growing thing, but it
doesn't yet seem to be huge.

~~~
rhizome
Analog tracks the rawest, sure, but Visitors and others, for all their
relative flaws, do track crawlers and related. They seem to me to track enough
noise that the discrepancy isn't so easily attributable.

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MattBearman
They say "84% of the browser market" now supports the DNT headers, but that's
quite clearly a lie, as the article previously says that only IE9 supports
DNT, not IE6-8.

Using the browser usage data they link to you can see it's actually only about
29% of the browser market that supports DNT headers.

This difference in stats may seem insignificant, but if it actually were 84% a
lot more advertisers might pay attention to DNT, where as at 29% they're a lot
more likely to be ignored. Even if Google Chrome got on board, it would still
only be about 41%.

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zaidf
Safari will be the first browser to auto-block google ads. Jobs will send a
one-liner "99% of people don't click on that crap."

Watch.

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Rondrak
Would there be any practical difference between DNT baked into the browser and
the cookie method from something like Beef Taco?
[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/beef-taco-
tar...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/beef-taco-targeted-
advertising/)

------
pointillistic
There is a Chrome extension "Keep My Opt-Outs" by Google. Is it different from
the DNT and how?

~~~
JonnieCache
It is an example of the "active" cookie based approach to this same thing
mentioned in the article. The "Keep My Opt-Outs" extension is linked at the
bottom of the article.

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adolph
Are there differences between the "Do Not Track" implementations?

~~~
adolph
From TFA:

 _Mozilla made the first step in building broad browser support for "Do Not
Track" in Firefox 4. Instead of the cookie-based mechanism suggested by the
FTC, however, Firefox sends a specially formatted HTTP header to Web servers
noting that the user does not want to be tracked. Microsoft added support for
the headers in the recently released IE9, and now Apple appears set to add it
to Safari once Lion is released._

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omouse
Bah, this article is trash. The Chrome browser is free software which means
that this feature _will_ be added into the code, whether it is officially
released as Chrome is another matter. I'm fairly certain that the non-Google
version, Chromium or whatever they're calling it, will include this feature.

