The "do not track" concept relies on 3rd party decency and you don't have to look much further than the spam in your Inbox to see how well that works. A do-not-track request is like saying "please don't take my lunch money"; that request would be honored by almost everyone but do you think it would change what a bully does? If you put something valuable in your front yard with a sign that says "property of Joe Smith", sure it might stay there a few hours...but eventually someone will come along and take your property anyway.
In the real world you might be able to find witnesses and involve the police to deal with a theft. On the Internet there's nobody to report a "do not track" violation to and no reliable way to punish anyone who simply ignores what you say. The 3rd party doing the tracking can be anyone in the world.
I can't see how the online business can afford to allow Do Not Track. Put the other way: you can only have gmail if you agree hand over your personal information to Google.
Put the other way: you can only have gmail if you agree hand over your personal information to Google.
That would be soo awesome!
Also, from where comes this belief that tracking generates such an absurd amount of money? It must be some sort of "it will be valuable in the future" thinking going on because today it can't mean much.
IF tracking was so effective it would be something that the customer wanted (and there you have it - that's how the online business will survive, by actually producing something that the customer wants). Now it's just sad and the only real feature of tracking and content aware ads is that when there have been an ax murder you will get a discount on axes - which is so bad it is kind of funny.
This thing about discount on axes would likely still happen without tracking. Tracking in itself will allow to do things like do frequency capping (do not want to display the same ad 400 times to the same person), give higher values to displaying ads many times (second time is worth more!), or to display ads to someone we know has visited one of the ads' customer websites.
The general idea is to be able to do this kind of regrouping, and it is, for all purposes, anonymous past what a browser can usually send (IP addresses allowing to derive geographical location) unless you try to use tracking to generate some very precise information on a user. This is generally useless to do because real information will come from third parties and you don't need to do all that work by yourself.
That is to say, I'm much more worried about a company like google doing tracking when they know my mobile phone number, age, gender, name, occupation, etc. Than any third-party tracking business that will pretty much never know these things for sure, except when a business like Google or Facebook will tell them about it.
In general though, all of this tracking is much less worse than whatever use of a credit card I make, given they openly do much more invasive searches and can do far more with this information than most online businesses, limited to displaying ads that might or might not fit my likings better.
Even if you don't use tracking for advertising targeting, a lot of untargeted / contextually-targeted ad buys require frequency caps. No frequency caps, no ad buys.
You seem skeptical that ad targeting works. In fact, it works pretty well. Not perfect, could be better, but it's certainly profitable.
They just wouldn't want to because it would cut into their profit margin. It's not like they couldn't sell ads directed at the non-tracked people, they'd just be less targeted ads. There's still money in it.
After reading all 3 parts of the series the thing that bugs me most right now is:
Heck, those are great ideas! I'd like to write a tracking system that does everything possible to collect the data and uniquely identify the users! It doesn't sound that hard.
I wonder how many of those tracking companies find the "Privacy Awareness" articles actually to be very nice "How to better track your users" articles.
As long as the ads & analytics industries continue to see the options as "meaningful Do Not Track" or "indiscriminately grab all the data you can", then I agree.
However, as the article suggests:
If [the industry refuses a meaningful Do Not Track], Internet users who do not want their online reading habits recorded by invisible tracking companies will have only one choice: use ad blocking tools to stop online tracking code themselves. In order for this to work, they will have to block a huge portion of the advertising on the Web, too.
If indiscriminate tracking keeps becoming increasingly obnoxious and/or insidious, it will eventually overcome the users' apathy, and they'll fight indiscriminate tracking with indiscriminate blocking. Users have the power to kill the internet tracking industries, they just don't have the will (yet). A meaningful Do Not Track option would show that the industries were willing to compromise with the users, which would go a long way to defuse the growing will to do away with them.
Refusing to compromise with the people who have the power to destroy you is never a good plan in the long term. Ask Louis XVI, or the Tsars.
If enough people use ad blocking technologies, the ads and analytics industries will simply switch to server-side / invisible-to-the-end-user options.
The only reason why tracking and ad serving isn't done like this today is because it's a pain in the ass and there's high switching costs. Make current practices unprofitable, and switching suddenly looks appealing.
A lot of previously theoretical workarounds are being quietly turned into commercial products these days. As a consequence of all the privacy fuss, there's a good chance you'll end up with less privacy than before.
Eh, it's an arms-race, if the tracking systems move on-server, then adblock et al will adapt to still block them, or be replaced by something that does.
I could see either the trackers or the anonymisers coming out on top. Or we could end up with single-user:single-identity type walled gardens and darknets running side-by-side.
They probably won't agree, though I have no basis for that claim other than witnessing capitalism-in-motion for so many years.
However, does it really matter? With things like ad-block, ghostery, noscript, etc; in the end the consumer more or less has the final say. Awareness of these type of plugins will only become more ubiquitous over time as the world becomes more and more tech savvy; and/or this tracking has a negative effect on consumers that they actually feel.
If someone cares enough to look for a do-not-track setting, likely they can be bothered to find a plugin that enforces it.
In the end though I agree with `methodin`; the line for tracking is really fuzzy without breaking basic functionality. The nature of the internet is such that users are going to have to take their anonymity, in-so-much as they desire it, into their own hands; and tools that make it easy for them will continue to be, and I presume grow, ever more successful.
You cannot viably eliminate tracking via Do Not Track... the entire modern Internet is based on the concept of tracking.