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Comment by dudus | Hacker News Reader

It was always the intention of DNT to represent the user choice.

It was just not explicit that it should be OFF by default. Reviewers fault. Microsoft, made a Marketing stunt of enabling it by default 2 years ago, in practice killing the point of DNT and setting back the industry several years.

With a default option DNT would have no reason to be honored by any site owner. We could be enjoying native DNT tracking right now if Microsoft hadn't done that stupid dick move 2 years ago.

How many years we'll need before the number of users that already have DNT set to ON by default are negligent is hard to measure.

This should be a post apologizing for the trouble they caused and for destroyed the point of a W3C proposal that set back the industry for several years. Instead it looks like another Marketing stunt.

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> With a default option DNT would have no reason to be honored by any site owner. We could be enjoying native DNT tracking right now if Microsoft hadn't done that stupid dick move 2 years ago[...]This should be a post apologizing for the trouble they caused and for destroyed the point of a W3C proposal that set back the industry for several years. Instead it looks like another Marketing stunt.

You're taking this really far out into left field and what you're saying is incorrect. DNT is a useless standard; it requires the visiting site to receive the preference and act appropriately on it. There is no way to enforce that the site acts appropriately. Sites that want to track users were always going to anyway. Except for maybe a few exceptions (such as I would expect browser makers to follow the standard) almost no one was ever going to honor this even before Microsoft's decision.

If you have a business where tracking users can make it more profitable and the W3C came along with a standard that said "if you receive this bit pretty please don't track the user please" why would you even care? There is nothing anyone can do about whether you track or not. At worst someone on a blog publishes a rant about how you're ignoring it but big whoop; countless other sites are also going to be ignoring it.

I think evidence goes the other way. You can ask web crawlers not to index certain pages with robots.txt even if it would be better for their business if they did. And this is widely respected. Now imagine that IIS put "* deny" in the default site config; it would get a lot less respect.

This example actually highlights an interesting difference between the two.

I think one of the reasons robots.txt is generally respected is that there's a stick behind that carrot; hypothetically (what with us all using so much cloud these days), a site administrator that noticed a traffic spike commensurate with something ignoring robots.txt can respond by treating the requests as attacker-originated, which most "legitimate" sites would want to avoid.

What's the stick behind the carrot for do not track?

You can block cookies or even block ad networks.

Yeah, sure, your average end-user is totally going to do that.

That's the difference between the two scenarios. A sysadmin will know what to look for and will know how to appropriately react to it. Your average end user probably doesn't know, care, or know how to react to it. And a built-in browser implementation will never happen because all the major companies have it in their best interests not to implement such a feature. If that weren't the case, we'd have had that feature long ago.

I doubt an average sysadmin would ever notice, let alone knowing what to do about it, let alone putting in the time and effort to do it.

Anyway I'm not sure I put the responsibility on the right group. It will probably be down to websites choosing ad networks that respect their users' DNT settings. Just like they choose ad networks that don't host malicious ads or ads that take over the whole page.

That's a lot more probable, yeah. I doubt anything were to happen on the end user side to enforce this.

adBlock has millions of users. If DNT decreases the adoption or even slows the adoption of adBlocks that's already a big win for adNetworks. You don't necessarily have to track a user to display ads, it's just possible to do more effective advertising if you do so.

> I think evidence goes the other way. You can ask web crawlers not to index certain pages with robots.txt even if it would be better for their business if they did.

I disagree. robots.txt is almost always used for hiding pages that shouldn't be exposed to the internet and are useless to expose. For example you don't need a robots.txt crawling the html document you're statically serving to prove domain ownership for Google Apps.

Everyone wants the most views on their content as possible so the incentive is to let as many things as possible be indexed therefore using robots.txt is limited as much as possible. It would not be good for search engines to crawl the things put into robots.txt.

> At worst someone on a blog publishes a rant about how you're ignoring it

At worst the federal government decides the line the advertising industry has been feeding them about being able to regulate themselves is just that, a line, and decides perhaps consumers need some protections backed by force of law.

That's the only thing that ever had a chance of making advertisers take DNT seriously.

Really? Its Microsoft's fault? I totally agree that "Don't Track" should be the default. I get the new proposal as well - but to say that they somehow set it back is BS.

What is holding it back is that there are no teeth to it - no laws that you must respect it - and lots of rewards for ignoring it. That's what needs to change.

It's politics. If the default is "don't track", advertisers have a case that the user has not explicitly asked to disable tracking.

> advertisers have a case that the user has not explicitly asked to disable tracking.

Advertisers don't need a case. They don't need to ever care about this bit.

DNT is not a technology that will automatically restrict people from tracking you like adBlock for instance. The idea is that good citizens will honor your choice of not be tracked.

It needs buy in from both users, advertisers and publishers. If you make it so that you only get approval from users, advertisers and publishers will ignore it and the whole thing collapses. They already have very little incentive to honor it.

We could have seen laws, in the future, requiring business to honor it. But this move by Microsoft gave publishers/advertisers all the weapons they would need to fight those bills. It no longer express the choice of the users, and that was the key of DNT.

Microsoft move completely removed any possibility that publishers or advertisers could support it, basically killing the proposal. It is their fault. Do not expect to see anyone honoring it anytime soon.

> Microsoft move completely removed any possibility that publishers or advertisers could support it, basically killing the proposal. It is their fault. Do not expect to see anyone honoring it anytime soon.

Most advertisers that I read about who were also vocal against DNT said they would not honor it before Microsoft even made it a default. Quit kidding yourself that Microsoft's decision did anything but hasten its irrelevance.

It certainly didn't help either

It didn't really do jack squat. People weren't going to respect it anyway, so what Microsoft did couldn't possibly have changed their mind.

At the very worst, it should have only been an unselected, mandatory radio button at install or first run. "Do you want IE to ask websites to stop tracking you?"

>DNT is not a technology that will automatically restrict people from tracking you like adBlock for instance.

But turning the browser-side setting into that? Now there's an idea.

While I'm all for having DNT's default set to ON, how much does it really change?

Is there really any impetus for companies to not track you when you send a DNT header? Is there really any governing body that enforces it in any meaningful way?

I can imagine a release of a plugin similar to Privacy Badger or Ghostery that whitelists sites that honor DNT and follow a reasonable privacy policy. I'd use it.

This may seem paradoxical, in that this plugin would only work correctly by not sending DNT to those sites.

But I've found that some tracking cookies are useful (the one for editing Wikimedia projects, for example), and sites should be able to earn their way onto a whitelist, as long as they honor the requests of people who say "No. Don't track me. Not even you."

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