Hacker News Reader

Comment by anonymousab | Hacker News Reader

I would be happy to accept denied access to most sites before loading their content.

It'd be cool if browsers could send some sort of do not track header, that sites could then use to refuse to serve you any content.

Assuming that they actually do want none of those users to consume their content in that way.

View on HN

They can. Or could. The world chose to ignore the header.

DNT headers are a thing. They were proposed by Mozilla originally, and its use was suppose to be opt in (and of course so is any compliance by the site in question).

Then IE10 turned it on by default, making it pretty much completely useless as a signal for site owners.

Changing the default value of DNT to "on", so that you needed to opt in if you wanted tracking, didn't make the header "useless" for site owners. But it did make it awfully inconvenient, because it underlined an awfully inconvenient truth: if a site makes money off tracking users, then the best interest of the site is at odds with the best interest of the users. Of course, many sites still wanted tracking, so they resorted to the scummy tactic of just ignoring the header.

In other words: if most users do not want to get tracked, this should have been a signal to stop fucking tracking. The fact that it didn't doesn't reflect well on sites, to put it mildly.

I totally agree with josteink: this is good news because it means that anti-tracking measures are starting to hurt.

Rather, people decided that after tracking became opt-in (as it should be), that they suddenly didn't like the game rules anymore now it had turned against them, and chose to violate your privacy regardless of your choice.

IE10, Safari and Firefox all did sensible things. The industry just doesn't want sensible things, it wants to violate everybody's privacy uninterrupted.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com