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Comment by jtchang | Hacker News Reader

Took me a second to figure out this whole DNT business.

So basically it is just an HTTP header your browser sends to the server that tells it not to track. Seems kind of like the wrong way to do it. If I was some nefarious website wouldn't I have straight up ignore it? There isn't any incentive for me to not track a user. In fact aren't a lot of companies around advertising based on the fact that you CAN track users?

More info here: http://donottrack.us/

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The thing about DNT is that the advertising industry (not malicious/shady websites) are supportive of it as a voluntary standard that they will comply with it. All the major players are saying they won't play nicely with IE10 due to the default on flag instead of a default null (no intent expressed) flag.

In other words meaning they're not going to support it...

"We're only going to support it if it's not turned on by default" is not really supporting DNT. It really shows they're business model depends on people being computer illiterate. And now that DNT is on by default they're revolting because they know few people will ever go out of their way to opt-in and get tracked.

> "We're only going to support it if it's not turned on by default"

No, they are only going to support it if it is _actually_ the users intent, not a vendors intent. This is completely reasonable and the actions of MS are undermining the efforts to get this voluntary standard going. Keep in mind, DNT is completely voluntary.

One could just as easily argue that a user should only be tracked if it's their explicit intent to be tracked, in which case DNT should be on unless the user turns it off. That makes more sense to me, and I think a lot of people would agree. Obviously, Microsoft thinks that should be the case.

I have a hard time believing MS is doing this for their users benefit. It seems much more likely they think this will hurt Google.

Next you'll tell me corporations mainly donate to charity for tax purposes and free publicity...

I don't care if they're really doing it to hurt Google. Increased privacy for users is a good thing.

You can waffle all you want about user intent, but it's quite obvious that they will only support an opt-out scheme.

Advertising almost never implement opt-in unless legally forced to.

What method are they using to determine if it's _actually_ the user's intent?

You have to explicitly set it on, that means the user had to take a specific action, and that means there was an intent to do it.

There are three values that the header can contain.

  null - no value set
  
  0 - opted in to tracking
  
  1 - opted out of tracking

A 0 or 1 imply intent and null would imply the user has taken no action.

One could also argue that Microsoft is not being pragmatic in expecting these companies to continue to honour it if it is on by default. At least when it is off by default, it will be honoured if a user opts to turn it on.

I agree, additionally it's not even really "off" by default. The default in the spec right now is a null value which indicates "we don't know" which is actually accurate until the user makes a choice.

Doesn't that make sense? If someone doesn't care enough to go in and turn on DNT, why does it matter if they're tracked? The default should obviously be 'null', that's the most equitable choice for all parties involved.

Because ignorance doesn't equal informed consent.

Websites don't track people, pervasive analytics, ad and social networks do. Since they have to be included by the website owners, they're usually not "scammers-r-us" but legal companies like Google, Facebook, KISSmetrics, etc.

Supposedly, the incentive for them not to track users who have DNT enabled is the PR hit.

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