
Coalition Announces New ‘Do Not Track’ Standard for Web Browsing (2015) - cpeterso
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/coalition-announces-new-do-not-track-standard-web-browsing
======
NelsonMinar
The decision of the Internet advertising industry to ignore the original Do
Not Track setting is a landmark in the cynicism of the industry. I mean users
made an explicit request to not be tracked and companies like Google and
Facebook were all "lol, no, we'll track you anyway". It's one of the reasons I
feel no remorse running an ad blocker.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
In fairness, a leading cause of DNT's failure is that Microsoft, for marketing
purposes, chose to set DNT by default for a while. While I applaud the goal of
assuming people don't want tracking, it gave ad companies an excuse to dismiss
DNT: Because many users showing DNT settings had not explicitly meant to do
so.

~~~
Fnoord
> Microsoft, for marketing purposes

If Microsoft does something in the interest of their users it is suddenly "for
marketing purposes"?

> While I applaud the goal of assuming people don't want tracking

 _Of course_ people don't want tracking. I'm not going to argue everyone
agrees with GDPR, but that sets the trend further.

> Because many users showing DNT settings had not explicitly meant to do so.

Just because someone doesn't explicitly agree with something, doesn't mean
they disagree with that.

~~~
treve
Even though it might in theory have been the best default for end-users, in
practice they made DNT fail as a result because advertisers wanted users to
make an explicit choice instead of getting opted out by default. It's easy to
blame the advertisers here, and sure.. you can argue that in this scenario
they were the 'more evil' ones, but had Microsoft not made this choice, we
ultimately could have ended up with a respected DNT header, which later on
could have become a default anyway.

So I don't disagree that the decision might have come from a good place, but
the end-result was not hard to predict and was ultimately not in the interest
of users. It was incredibly dumb.

~~~
belorn
The advertisers chosen to ignore DNT. It don't matter if they decided to do so
because they disliked the concept of DNT or if they did so because the OS
manufactorers decided to change the opt-in to opt-out. The decision was made
solely by the advertisers, and there the blame resides.

If Microsoft had not made this choice then the advertisers could still have
made the same decision. We will never know, and it doesn't really matter. Its
a "what if" situation, and like many such "what if"s we are simply speculating
about motives while not looking at the billions of dollar worth of obvious
reasons why the advertisers wanted to ignore DNT.

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TravelTechGuy
As others have mentioned here, this is akin to a sheep carrying a sign saying
"please don't eat me", hoping wolves would respect it.

Furthermore, this sheep just highlighted the fact that it's a troublesome
sheep, that requires special attention (i.e. if the DNT flag is in the header
of the first request to my site, I know I can bust out my adblock-bypassing
scripts, and start serving ads differently).

When I worked for [name of major ad-supported company redacted], I
specifically asked a senior PM one day why are we ignoring the DNT flag in our
products. He said "because that's how we make our money", thought for another
second and added "also, everyone else ignores it".

~~~
user5994461
The wolf comparison is on point in that advertisers are evil creatures who
rely on hurting internet users to survive and thrive.

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xg15
I don't really understand how this is supposed to help. If I'm an
advertiser/tracker/etc, what keeps me from adding the policy file to my
website - so adblock, duckduckgo etc. are happy - and then blatantly violating
it?

The "policy" doesn't seem to be legally binding in any way, there is no way to
even detect violations and the EFF itself writes that it can't enforce it:

> _Posting the dnt-policy.txt file makes a promise to the users who interact
> with their domain. We believe it would be a false and misleading trade
> practice to post the policy without the intent to comply in good faith.
> However, EFF is not in a position to enforce this promise or monitor
> compliance._ [1]

So what's the point?

[1] [https://www.eff.org/dnt-policy#faq-What-does-the-dnt-
policy....](https://www.eff.org/dnt-policy#faq-What-does-the-dnt-policy.txt-
promise-mean)?

~~~
greglindahl
If you're a US company and you lie to your customers about what your policies
are, the FTC may well sue you. They do it all of the time over privacy
policies.

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javery
This is from 2015.

~~~
Ajedi32
Yeah, my first thought when I read the headline was "Again?".

DNT was actually pretty widely implemented in browsers for a while, but it
ultimately failed because there wasn't anything actually enforcing the
standard. It was essentially just a way to politely ask servers not to track
you.

~~~
Sylos
If Microsoft had't made it the default in IE, then DNT would have been an
explicit action to show that you do not consent to tracking, which would have
had legal bearing.

~~~
user5994461
It had zero legal bearing either way.

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hermitdev
I seriously doubt this will gain much traction. I would love it to, but I
doubt the motives behind advertisers.

I mean, just look at the current state of advertising on mobile. One
constantly gets ads hijacking the browser to show ads ostensibly from Amazon
or Walmart (I doubt either Amazon or Walmart would actually prevent you from
getting to the content you're looking at). The "well-done" ads prevent you
from even hitting the back-button on your browser to return to the content.
Being an Android user, I've effectively taken to using MS Edge on Android,
because at least in Edge, I can disable javascript, which has gone a long way
to crippling such ads. (Before anyone asks: I'm normally a Chrome user +
UBlock, etc etc, but Chrome doesn't support extensions on Android, and I've
never had good luck with FireFox for anything other than draining battery).

When Ad companies learn to play nice and not hijack my browser and
occasionally serve up out right malware, maybe, just MAYBE, will I reconsider
playing nice with them.

~~~
mtgx
You're right. The ship has sailed... _for advertisers_. They'll _wish_ this
DNT variant had caught-on, because since then ublock origin and others like it
have become significantly more popular, the native-adblock Brave browser is
growing slow and steady, and now even Mozilla offers users the option to
disable all tracking. Perhaps in another couple of years Mozilla will enable
it by default for everyone.

~~~
Endy
Except of course tracking for Mozilla's monetary and advertising partners,
like Google. They'll pass that off as part of their Shield Studies and insert
hidden tracking plugins into the browser which will be invisible to the user.

~~~
KozmoNau7
You'll need to provide some pretty solid proof for that accusation.

Credible Wireshark log dumps would be a good start.

~~~
Endy
Since I refused to downgrade to WebExtensions Firefox, and I'm currently using
Pale Moon for most browsing (and I'm looking at Otter as a possible #2), I
don't have access to it anymore. I simply do not trust Mozilla anymore, or
Firefox.

~~~
KozmoNau7
So you have absolutely no proof of any kind, other than paranoid ideas, which
fits in nicely with the usual misguided anti-webextensions ranting.

I'm sorry, but if you expect anyone to believe you, you're going to have to
produce actual evidence.

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mmagin
My issue with DNT is that it is generally another bit of uniqueness that makes
my browser slightly EASIER to track for anyone who doesn't care about obeying
it, which are likely the greatest threats.

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jackhack
If a security or privacy model depends on the cooperation of those on the
other end of the wire, it will fail.

~~~
nykolasz
This is the reason why DNT failed. If it can't be forced, the bad players
won't follow it.

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TheAceOfHearts
IMO, tracking should be strictly opt-in, making it opt-out is abusive and
ubethical.

I recently learned of GDPR. Although I'm uncertain of the exact law's
implementation details, I think it's a step in the right direction. It's
strictly opt-in and requires providing a clear explanation of what data gets
collected.

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noncoml
It is one of these things that it is too little too late. Ad blockers filled
in the gap and there is no need for a solution anymore.

Not to mention that AdBlock has lost all the good faith from the users, so
including it in the coalition only does damage to the public image.

------
Feniks
Please don't kill anyone vs. killing is against the law and you'll go to jail
if you do it.

I know which one works best.

------
tzahola
Coalition Announces New “Please Don’t Listen” Standard against Man-in-the-
middle Attacks

~~~
Endy
Or even better a new, "Please Don't Listen" standard against cell-phone
conversations on busy streets!

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labster
Cool, a new way our browsers can be fingerprinted! Thanks EFF for one more bit
of entropy!

Yes I know this was in good faith, but when you are trying to get good faith
agreement against the business model of an industry, it's no surprise it was a
failure.

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Cyberdog
> Disconnect’s partners in this launch are the innovative publishing site
> Medium

I know this is off-topic, but what is so innovative about Medium? Does it
break any significant ground beyond what LiveJournal was doing almost two
decades ago?

~~~
jasonkostempski
Nothing. I'm a bit surprised an EFF article is using all those meaningless
fluffy words to describe the partners.

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kevinoid
Could someone clarify: What's the standard? Is it adopting EFF's DNT policy
[https://www.eff.org/dnt-policy](https://www.eff.org/dnt-policy)? Is it
hosting any privacy policy at /.well-known/dnt-policy.txt? Do any tools or
browsers use that URL or display it to users? Has anyone else adopted this
standard?

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yuhong
The ad bubble and how it affects Google/Mozilla is now one of my favorite
topics. It is not just Google, but it is the most interesting.

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zimbatm
Now all we need if for websites to automatically hide the cookie warning
header when DNT is set.

~~~
Endy
Oh, I'm sure that someone out there already does. The question is whether
they're making enough money off it to do it en masse.

------
paulogubio
AUGUST 3, 2015

