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Comment by malikNF | Hacker News Reader

DNT made sense only in a world where there would be some sort of law to back it up.

I actually had my adblocker turned off on websites I knew at least tried to respect DNT (reddit, medium and twitter), guess twitter's getting completely adblocked now.

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I have no issue adblocking Twitter since they use deceptive ads.

It used to be ads had to be clearly labelled as not to confuse with regular content. Twitter buries their "promoted" label at the bottom in light grey text, so you only know it's an ad after you've read it and asked "WTF? Why is this in here?"

Somehow my brain has figured out how to notice that and ignore them.

Scrolling through my feed I swipe past the ads faster than the other tweets.

There is a law that backs up DNT -- if a website's privacy policy says they respect DNT, and they don't, and it's discovered, it's the same as any other privacy policy problem. You can read in the news about fines, consent decrees, etc related to privacy policy violations.

Maybe. I think in practice that would have eventually led to "disable DNT in order to access Facebook, etc."

I wonder if the major adblockers should have whitelisted the DNT-respecting sites by default.

They haven't for most cases but to be fair, even if the publisher would respect DNT, it doesn't mean that the ad-server at the end of the line or any of the other partners will.

Also keep in mind that while this would be an incentive to respect DNT for some time, there's no guarantee that this would stick - they might at some point just get back to evil behavior when they get whitelisted.

Was the initial hope that the tech would come first and the legislation would follow?

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