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Comment by magicalist | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla's reaction: http://blog.mozilla.org/privacy/2012/05/31/do-not-track-its-...

"There are three different signals to consider in broadcasting the user’s preferences for tracking:

  User says they accept tracking
  User says they reject tracking
  User hasn’t chosen anything

Firefox defaults to state 3: we don’t know what the user wants, so we’re not sending any signals to servers. This causes the presence of the signal to mean more — the signal being sent should be the user’s choice, not ours. Therefore, Firefox doesn’t broadcast anything until our user has told us what to send."

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also, from this Microsoft's post:

"At the moment there is not yet an agreed definition of how to respond to a DNT signal, and we know that a uniform, industry-wide response will be the best way to provide a consistent consumer experience across the Web.... Microsoft does not yet respond to the DNT signal, but we are actively working with other advertising industry leaders on what an implementation plan for DNT might look like, with a goal of announcing more details about our plans in the coming months."

Brilliant, guys. I'm really excited that you're fully embracing something you have no clue how it's actually going to work. Instead of giving yourself an out, why not just commit to an aggressive interpretation of "do not track" on the server side as well?

(to be fair, when you wait two years between browser releases, you do have to try to aim where the market is moving towards, rather than where it is)

>we don’t know what the user wants

How about they ask their users on first install?

Unlikely to happen, since all their revenue of more than hundred million dollars a year comes from Google, which stands to lose big if that feature is implemented.

Opera and Chrome stand to lose too, so that won't happen there. Bing's revenues(and MSN.com etc.) also stand to lose with it, but looks like MS is okay with it.

The only exception with no stake in all this is Apple, which has already implemented third party cookie blocking in iPhone Safari(and Google got some heat for circumventing it).

Edit: On further thought, Apple does get a cut from Google being the default search, but it's probably such a miniscule part of their revenues that they can easily forgo in the name of doing the right thing for their users.

So everyone clicks "no" (or gets confused and asks a technical relative), Firefox always sends the DNT header, so no sites respect it.

>or gets confused and asks a technical relative

Isn't that a good thing for users to know about tracking? Firefox can always include some small popup help with the prompt explaining the DNT.

>so no sites respect it

But they will lose a big excuse(it's default) not to support it.

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