Do Not Track has been effectively dead for 1.5 years. Very few advertising companies ever supported it due to Microsoft's decision to buck the spec and enable it by default for all IE10 users (a transparent attack on Google by a company whose own advertising business had just imploded in a $4B write-off).
The original agreement was carefully hashed out between advertisers and browser vendors with the understanding that only a small percentage of users would be opting out. When Microsoft reneged on that, the advertising industry backed out.
Whatever you think about online tracking, the voluntary nature of DNT and the complete lack of enforceability (there's no way, as a user, to determine whether a company is following DNT) made it pretty useless. True privacy protection needs to be on the client side (like script blocking or 3rd party cookie blocking), not on the server side.
What level of "not by default" would have been acceptable to advertisers? I suspect they would be happy only if the option was disabled by default and hidden from view. An uninformed consumer is a trackable consumer.
I have. You have to click through to a separate screen to get the option to disable it. If you try that, it will warn you on the next screen that you are not using the recommended settings. Then variously using IE10 you will get prompted to use the recommended settings. Microsoft makes it pretty hard for an average person to disable it.
DNT was a voluntary standard, and the advertisers refused to buy in unless it was off by default (the vast majority of people will not change defaults, even if you make it easy for them). Microsoft violated that agreement to hurt Google, and as a result DNT is dead.
The whole point of DNT is that it is a voluntary measure by advertisers to avoid tracking people who don't want to be tracked.
Given that turning DNT on by default would essentially turn DNT on for everybody, supporting DNT in that scenario would have imploded the whole business model of the same advertisers.
Obviously they're not going to voluntarily decide to go out of business, so the advertisers then dropped support for DNT entirely.
Now no one gets the benefit of DNT, not even the privacy-conscious minority who actually cared about it.
we already beat that horse to death. it is not enable by default. it is SHOWN to the user to chose. and the checkbox is enabled by default, because, let's agree on this, microsoft did their homework and that is the best choice to recomend to their users.
it is never enabled against the user knowledge. it is just the correct default when it is presented to them.
and again, by no-one, you mean YOU. you are pissed off that everyone is not disabled on DNT and not even shown the option, and only you and other tech savvy people can benefit.
Yeah, it gave users an options buttons to change what would otherwise be the default express settings. So DNT was on by default. The ad industry wanted off by default.
And let's be fair, most people are going to agree to that long list of default settings even if the third bullet said "Sends 1 Bitcoin to Microsoft"
> The original agreement was carefully hashed out between advertisers and browser vendors with the understanding that only a small percentage of users would be opting out.
Source? How can those parties decide for users how many of them will opt out?
The original agreement was carefully hashed out between advertisers and browser vendors with the understanding that only a small percentage of users would be opting out. When Microsoft reneged on that, the advertising industry backed out.
Whatever you think about online tracking, the voluntary nature of DNT and the complete lack of enforceability (there's no way, as a user, to determine whether a company is following DNT) made it pretty useless. True privacy protection needs to be on the client side (like script blocking or 3rd party cookie blocking), not on the server side.