This seems dead on arrival, because Homebrew (as they reference on-page) by necessity contacts a wide array of remote addresses, giving away the user’s IP repeatedly as part of normal operation. That conflicts with redefining “track” to be different from the original meaning in the DNT header, to now extend to include any remote network connections at all - not just “do not compile a user profile from this network connection” but instead “do not divulge the existence of a user”.
If this had restrained itself to the definition of tracking used by the original failed DNT effort, I might think very highly of it, but attempting to shoehorn the more stringent “offline by default” viewpoint into the framing stolen from DNT makes this proposal unlikely to be widely adopted.
It’s really unfortunate that this good technical idea was combined with that overreach, as once the idea is rejected by others for going too far, any similar idea will likely be rejected without consideration. Oh well.
Tangentially, do all the adblock extension users realize that their IP address is constantly divulged by all the rules updates their extensions are running in the background? This proposal would, if fully implemented through the entire software stack, result in browsers launched on the user’s machine refusing to allow any background network connections, which would break all ad blockers as they depend critically on that behavior. I’m not convinced that users prioritize “don’t divulge my IP address” over “block ads”, which seems to be a conceptual nail in the coffin of overreach here.
Expanding that to mean “do not reveal the user’s IP address” is a significant expansion of the original meaning, having little to do with the protection against being individually tracked that the DNT header was designed for.
Asking Homebrew to disable analytics has nothing to do with targeted advertising opt-outs, but supports the ideological goal of the authors in promoting their new idea that revealing the existence of the user is “tracking”. That expansion exceeds the scope of the definition of “tracking” as used to reference targeted advertising and marketing, something that is not applicable to the Homebrew project’s existing flag in any way.
Attempting to promote their beliefs by aliasing those two concepts together - tracking protection against targeted advertising, versus disabling telemetry and auto update - is therefore overreach to me, especially when presented without this context to projects such as Homebrew and others in pull requests, and I think it will ultimately lead to their effort’s failure.
To me, this is all a direct consequence of their attempt to ride the coattails of the failed DNT effort by reusing its key phrase “do not track”. They should have used a different name. In a few seconds, I can think of a pretty great one that still acronyms to DNT, so clearly creativity wasn’t the obstacle here. Instead they chose to anchor to “Do Not Track” and it’s too late now to change that. We’ll see what happens.
> the original mission of DNT, which was to request that sites not harvest a user’s data for targeted advertising
It was a lot more amorphous than that. Some of the people behind DNT did have that particular meaning in mind, but others had different sets of things they wanted to prevent. There was enough disagreement on this point that they didn't manage to get consensus on anything more than "this specification does not define requirements on what a recipient needs to do to comply with a user's expressed tracking preference" -- https://www.w3.org/TR/tracking-dnt/
That seems like particularly poor quicksand to build a new "do not track" effort upon, yes; adding yet another interpretation worsens things and ties this new effort to a failed effort's legacy.
If this had restrained itself to the definition of tracking used by the original failed DNT effort, I might think very highly of it, but attempting to shoehorn the more stringent “offline by default” viewpoint into the framing stolen from DNT makes this proposal unlikely to be widely adopted.
It’s really unfortunate that this good technical idea was combined with that overreach, as once the idea is rejected by others for going too far, any similar idea will likely be rejected without consideration. Oh well.
Tangentially, do all the adblock extension users realize that their IP address is constantly divulged by all the rules updates their extensions are running in the background? This proposal would, if fully implemented through the entire software stack, result in browsers launched on the user’s machine refusing to allow any background network connections, which would break all ad blockers as they depend critically on that behavior. I’m not convinced that users prioritize “don’t divulge my IP address” over “block ads”, which seems to be a conceptual nail in the coffin of overreach here.