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Comment by dmethvin | Hacker News Reader

> due to Microsoft's decision to buck the spec and enable it by default for all IE10 users

Did you ever install IE10? The screen gave users the option to configure everything but selected the most likely settings for many things, not just DNT: http://img.wonderhowto.com/img/21/42/63487287284459/0/yahoo-...

What level of "not by default" would have been acceptable to advertisers? I suspect they would be happy only if the option was disabled by default and hidden from view. An uninformed consumer is a trackable consumer.

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I have. You have to click through to a separate screen to get the option to disable it. If you try that, it will warn you on the next screen that you are not using the recommended settings. Then variously using IE10 you will get prompted to use the recommended settings. Microsoft makes it pretty hard for an average person to disable it.

DNT was a voluntary standard, and the advertisers refused to buy in unless it was off by default (the vast majority of people will not change defaults, even if you make it easy for them). Microsoft violated that agreement to hurt Google, and as a result DNT is dead.

so, DNT can be recommended to you and your close ones, but not the general public? that is some entitlement you have going on there.

i applaud microsoft for protecting their customers, instead of selling them out like google does with android.

also, most big advertisers chose to ignore DNT only for IE. so no, it has not been dead for that long.

The whole point of DNT is that it is a voluntary measure by advertisers to avoid tracking people who don't want to be tracked.

Given that turning DNT on by default would essentially turn DNT on for everybody, supporting DNT in that scenario would have imploded the whole business model of the same advertisers.

Obviously they're not going to voluntarily decide to go out of business, so the advertisers then dropped support for DNT entirely.

Now no one gets the benefit of DNT, not even the privacy-conscious minority who actually cared about it.

Welcome to second and third-order effects...

we already beat that horse to death. it is not enable by default. it is SHOWN to the user to chose. and the checkbox is enabled by default, because, let's agree on this, microsoft did their homework and that is the best choice to recomend to their users.

it is never enabled against the user knowledge. it is just the correct default when it is presented to them.

and again, by no-one, you mean YOU. you are pissed off that everyone is not disabled on DNT and not even shown the option, and only you and other tech savvy people can benefit.

Yeah, it gave users an options buttons to change what would otherwise be the default express settings. So DNT was on by default. The ad industry wanted off by default.

And let's be fair, most people are going to agree to that long list of default settings even if the third bullet said "Sends 1 Bitcoin to Microsoft"

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