
Google Releases "Do Not Track" Extension for Chrome - dcawrey
http://www.thechromesource.com/google-releases-do-not-track-extension-for-chrome/
======
paulirish
Blog post: [http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2011/01/keep-your-
opt...](http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2011/01/keep-your-opt-
outs.html)

Extension source: <https://code.google.com/p/chrome-opt-out-extension/>

------
jdp23
Hot on the heels of Firefox' "Do not Track" announcement* ... momentum is
building.

[http://www.futureofprivacy.org/2011/01/24/breaking-news-
fire...](http://www.futureofprivacy.org/2011/01/24/breaking-news-firefox-do-
not-track-advances/)

------
randall
I wonder how "Do Not Track" will effect advertising biz models. Part of the
allure of online is that you can not only verify that each ad was served
(something impossible to prove pre-internet) but you're also able to target
really well.

I wonder if services will respond in some sort of anti-consumer arms race, by
limiting service features or the sort. (Imagine if FF/Goog released an AdBlock
style plugin.) I'm not saying it'll be as drastic as blocking content if
you're not tracked, but I am curious what the HN community's thoughts are on
the idea of a tracking arms race.

------
beoba
It's too late for me - once user tracking became prevalent I switched to using
ad blockers and haven't looked back.

------
there
users savvy enough to find/install extensions are probably using adblock or
other things anyway. this doesn't really mean much from google until they make
it a built-in feature of chrome so all of their users benefit from it.

------
jacquesm
Now to make such stuff the default and change being tracked to 'opt-in'.

~~~
jbooth
The whole internet works on free-because-of-advertising, aside from Hacker
News I guess which is just an advertisement for Ycombinator.

Sure we want to pull the rug out from under that one? What's so bad about
content creators getting maximum value from the eyeballs they attract?

~~~
jacquesm
You can advertise stuff without having to know everything about your visitors,
standard demographics kept newspapers supplied with ink and papers for well
over a century.

~~~
jbooth
Well, turning "ip:25.43.251.5, user-agent:firefox" into "male, 18-19" actually
requires a fair bit of that tracking stuff.

Also, classifieds are what kept newspapers supplied with ink and papers.
Branding-targeted advertising was a side revenue, and mass conversion-targeted
advertising as we know it now didn't really exist yet (although you can call
classifieds a small-scale conversion targetted ad, I suppose).

~~~
jacquesm
Indeed, classifieds are simply ads targeted at a local audience.

As for the male 18-19 bit, that is something that a site would deduce from a
typical sample or survey, not from invasive tracking.

btw, how did you get my IP address? You got the age wrong ;)

~~~
jbooth
Well, RE: samples or surveys, users don't fill them out very often, which is
why ad networks and information providers drop a cookie whenever they manage
to find that out about someone for later recall. If you're just some blog, no
way people are filling that out on your site.. so you get a deal with a
tracking ad company that combines your traffic with data to make it more
valuable than just run-of-the-network generic traffic.

~~~
jacquesm
The samples and surveys I'm referring to are paid for by the media company,
typically conducted by third parties with some credibility in the field.

Plenty of people are on a 'panel' of this kind, they periodically fill out
surveys about the brands they consume, the tv programmes they watch and sites
they visit. And yes, that's geared towards the larger content producers, it
would take some doing to get similar metrics for smaller companies and blogs,
but I can imagine that you could create a series of 'verticals' that would
form the aggregate of a whole series of blogs and blogs could then be
categorized as being part of a vertical to be included in the surveys in a
statistically relevant manner.

So it's not a survey that suddenly pops up on the site (though that's been
done, the quality of those is typically not as good).

------
yanw
'Do-Not-Track' is a bullshit, talking point gov't mandated initiative,
relevant ads offer better user experience, they are not 'evil'.

~~~
mquander
Relevant ads might offer a better user experience than irrelevant ads. You
know what offers an even better experience? No ads.

I'm in favor of anything that makes an free-with-advertising business model
less practical. Make me pay five bucks a month, if that's what the service
costs; there's no technical reason why it shouldn't be easy to set that up.
Don't slyly take the five bucks from me piecemeal, immeasurably, by replacing
the things I care about with distracting ads. I fucking hate it.

~~~
jbooth
Tell you what, you start cutting checks for 5 bucks whenever you visit a new
blog, and I bet they'll start switching to that business model immediately :)

~~~
jacquesm
Effectively ads are a bad substitute for a micro payment system. If there were
such a thing I think that ad free content would rule.

Imagine paying $20 on top of your current internet bill to never ever see
another ad on all the sites you visit and have that $20 distributed to those
sites proportional to how much time you spend there.

The reason that such schemes have not found much in terms of adoption are
chicken-and-the-egg related.

People that would not want to get on board with this could stick to the
current ad based solutions.

~~~
icey
What do you think about micropayment systems like Flattr?

<http://flattr.com/>

