I agree MS gave them a good excuse to get out of a system they didn't want to deal with, but it's a reasonable argument that defaulting DNT to on makes it not a user expression of intent. Even one of the Apache devs thought so and submitted a patch to ignore specifically IE10's DNT flag. Although the powers that be eventually rolled that patch back.

In a way, MS poisoned the well, no? Either by (as you state) providing a convenient excuse (possibly intentionally or unintentionally), or by using the flag as a jab at Google. It almost doesn't matter why they did it. The net result was that DNT was ignored by FB, Goog, Apple, Amazon, Adobe and Yahoo -- only Twitter (who use Google Analytics, oddly) went against the grain. MS was warned by a number of marketers this would be the result too, and MS responded with a rather hostile press release.

And yes it's PR... there's PR going around on all sides here -- that's part of what I am saying. Google et. al. are not innocent bystanders here, dont get me wrong, but I am trying to see the whole picture.

I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this one but I am glad that we both seem to want the same end-game: protecting user privacy. As long as there are smart, good people working on this goal, I think it's probably OK that it proceed on several fronts.

Personally I am more concerned about other data aggregators than Google (et. al.) though. If you look at companies like HireRight, Experian (et. al.) -- these companies are truly invading peoples lives. Most of the advertising networks are just selling targeting buckets (e.g. target your ad to males over 45 who make over $150k). But the credit bureaus control people's ability to get a house, to buy a car, to get a job. And there is no way to opt out of that.

Anyways, cheers for the debate.

Of course I read your post, please don't be condescending and spare me the piecemeal quoting. Not everything in my post was supposed to be a refutation of yours.

Suggesting we protect privacy through politics just sounds ridiculous to me. It was never even clear what was defined as tracking by DNT. DNT wasn't less intrusive, it was empty and symbolic. So, here's my question: why did we need an empty, symbolic regulation to show that ad companies are tracking people?

Back to your original point though, the ad industry seemed to be ready to support DNT until MS made the default setting on, which clearly wasn't a user's "wishes". This wasn't a display of the advertising industry's unwillingness to regulate themselves, it was their unwillingness to let MS dictate terms to them.

Additionally, the NAI has long had an opt out system: http://www.networkadvertising.... (long before DNT). Saying they failed to self-regulate strikes me a misinformed at best.

Also, you might want to consider your own knowledge level on a subject before accusing others of not understanding, it might improve "your persuasion skills".

I get what you are saying but I dont think it actually makes it any harder to argue ToS in court, especially if it is enabled by default in IE.

If you can agree to contractual terms by clicking through some agreement, you can agree to "waive" your DNT setting. Think about it this way, would it stand up in court if we put a "I don't agree to any DRM in the video I watch online" header in HTTP?

Either way, I am not sure what court is going to protect you from malicious actors that would not follow DNT. We should be working on stopping the ability to track, not about making statements of intent for possible future litigation in a court of law. Browsers were supposed to be the "thin-client-ish" gatekeepers that sandbox the web for users, not our legal representation.

Cross site tracking wasn't some secret. DNT just put some hand-wavey PR fluff at the forefront of the privacy debate, and it's not protecting anyone. This plays wonderfully for companies that make money from products and want to stick it to companies that make money off of ads.

I don't know about you, but I would like a real solution. A client HTTP header that asks to the server to please behave is a waste of everyone's time. From a technical perspective this should have been laughed out of the room before it ever got started. But DNT was always political. It was just so that some people/groups can point fingers and others can feel vindicated from a false sense of accomplishment. It is exactly what you are doing in your post.

But most of the people who have heard of DNT also knew cross site tracking was happening long before DNT came to be.

After the hype it seems that story was overblown -- looked like less than 1% were compromised. See: https://twitter.com/torproject...

Still.... I, for one welcome our new Weaponized Internet Ov...LOADING....

"Do Not Track" never meant anything at all. It's the equivalent of a "Please be nice to me" button.

We need technical solutions to make fingerprinting harder/impossible. Especially the canvas/font techniques.

It takes 2 clicks on Haxe's site to see it can be used with lots of different kinds of client and server code. Flash is mentioned as an "also, haxe can make swfs" http://haxe.org/use-cases/web/ (despite Flash being a huge part of Haxe's maturing development) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

Flash development and ActionScript as a language were never "shit". It certainly was abused and mismanaged, but technologically Flash/AS was amazingly useful -- especially in tying animation to code.

If you ever are willing to challenge your own beliefs you should take some time and checkout Haxe, and Apache Flex. Try keeping an open mind to technologies that greatly shaped the web we have today. A lot of ECMAScript was based on lessons learned from ActionScript. A lot of web games and comics were brought to you by Flash. YouTube, Twitch, Hulu, Yahoo Maps (formerly), and thousands of games, all were built on the backs of Flash. Firefox's original JIT was based on Flash 9 and donated by Adobe and is the second largest open source code donation ever to Mozilla.

Does Flash have problems? Definitely.

Should you dismiss a huge part of the web out of hand? Only if you want to make yourself look like a fool.

The federal guidelines are too short for yellow lights. And if all it took to make things safer was to lengthen the yellow, why do we need to trade once accident for another? What kind of justification is that? "It's less severe an injury!"

Given the way people actually drive, why not just increase the yellow?

It can work the other way around too -- if you get too far from your phone, it goes into pin/password lock mode. But if it is near a trusted bluetooth device, easily swipe to open. Works with any bluetooth (pebble, moto 360, your car) and Moto X 2013/2014 and Android 5+ devices. I assume iPhone has a similar feature.

Like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... ?

I hope you realize it is not FUD to bring up a company's own former strategy (EEE) and own past bad behavior.

You're talking about the embrace step. Certainly there should not be any OS lock-in there. That would be by design (assuming the worst of EEE for argument's sake). Platform lock-in comes with platform specific extensions, features, APIs, and libraries beyond the core. A very nefarious thing to do would be to introduce subtle bugs in other platform versions of the core or extensions. But that would be ridiculously hard to prove and I use it mostly just to dramatize how EEE could work.

I'm not saying MS is doing this, I am saying they should be watched with a very skeptical eye. Again... "be wary of your 'extended' dependencies".