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Comment by wirrbel | Hacker News Reader

Not a lawyer, but basically the website cannot distinguish whether a DNT setting was enabled by default or whether the user intended to set it so it really does not matter. It must be assumed that the user enabled the DNT setting.

Let's assume Aunt Agatha reads about the DNT setting in one of her magazines, goes to the browser settings, sees that it's enabled, takes no further action. That is no different from Uncle Ulysses who has a different browser with a DNT-disabled default who goes to the settings and enables its.

My letterbox has a sticker on it that I don't want to receive unsolicited ads. I don't need anyone to try to presume that it wasn't me who put that sticker onto my letterbox.

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It gets better than that. Once, I've seen / caught in the act / one ads-distributee who damaged the sticker on my box' lid. He was scratching it with a key. Then, suddenly vanished after seeing me.

After that, I got ads put into my box again. Once I asked one distributee if he can't see the sticker.. "it's damaged. So I thought you wanted to remove that, but it made problems so yo left it striken through"

I have trouble believing that's real. Why would these workers bother?

If you are paid by ad distributed wouldn’t you want to try to maximize the number of ads delivered in to the same apartment building?

Not through vandalism and scammyness, but maybe that's why I don't work in advertising.

The same reason we put 2-3 of them in the same letterbox or we trashed some packs at the end of a street (yeah I did that back in the '90s as a teenager). To work less and earn the same.

I mean at that point you could just put the entire stack in the nearest recycle bin and call it a day. Much more efficient! Much less of an annoyance to people.

But that would be easily discovered. It had to be "good enough".

I have no idea why they bother but the sticker on my post box and those of some neighbors were removed the third time now in the last 2 years. I know that they didn't remove them themselves because I talked with them and gave them new stickers. The kids in the house are either too small or to old to remove them so I can only assume it's the people distributing flyers. It sure is not the postman, he actually wrote a note asking everyone to put up those stickers because he didn't want to carry stuff that ends up in the trash anyway.

I've had door to door solicitors argue with me, after I pointed to my quite prominent "no soliciting" sign, that they weren't really "soliciting" but, rather, "marketing" and therefore the sign didn't apply to them.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This is fascinating. We have no such system in the US as far as I am aware. First, I think it’s against the law for anyone other than postal employees to put stuff in mailboxes. So we get flyers shoved under doors, in cracks around letterboxes, etc. Second, no one would respect those stickers. And third, because our postal service has to be self-sustaining and legit mail has declined, the only mail you get these days is advertisements.

I don't remember the beginnings of such stickers, but it had something to do with the litter produced by the unwanted mail. We have to pay for our litter here. And no one wants to pay for others :)

Just like the same reason for you can get fined for throwing away litter. If it's not your litter box.. :)

I wish that the free willy said "I don't want" is binding for all people over the world.

Sounds like it's epoxy time.

> Not a lawyer, but basically the website cannot distinguish whether a DNT setting was enabled by default or whether the user intended to set it so it really does not matter. It must be assumed that the user enabled the DNT setting.

In Firefox you can't even turn it off, except maybe via some about:config thingy, so that's not really an entirely valid assumption.

Of course you can turn it off. Edit -> Settings -> search for "track" -> select "Only when Firefox is set to block known trackers". Job done.

Yes exactly, you can't just turn it off.

But the website can perfectly reliably determine whether the browser's vendor string matches a browser version that has DNT enabled by default.

You've missed the point. Knowing the browser sets it by default says nothing about whether the user consciously decided to keep it that way, so claiming that it's just the browser default and therefore to be ignored was always just wordplay.

True. I probably misread the first sentence completely. My bad.

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