Comment Re:Welcome back Do Not Track header (Score 2) 85
Microsoft famously poisoned-pilled their implementation to kill it by making it the default, which gave advertisers an excuse to claim people didn't really mean to set it, and ignore it.
This is bullshit.
First, do you realize what a ridiculous kind of "standard" DNT is? Advertisers promise to honor it, as long as users promise not to use it. This is a real life Catch 22, and nobody should defend it.
The issue is worse though: the DNT "standard" wasn't ever intended to stop tracking. It was intended to sabotage other proposals submitted to the W3C who would have had an impact on Google's bottom line. From this point of view it succeeded brilliantly.
At the time tracking was considered an important issue and some reasonably effective solutions were submitted for standardization. One of them, for example, boiled down to embedding functionality equivalent to AdBlock directly in browsers. That was a customer-facing design, because it would have left the choice to customers, and stopped browsers from contacting malicious tracing sites completely.
Google realized the danger and invented DNT. DNT is a terrible technical solution, and its problems were well understood at the time. Here are some issues:
- there is no way to enforce DNT against a non-cooperating site
- there is no way to find out in advance whether some site honors DNT or not
- there is no way to even find out whether some particular request resulted in your being tracked
- the feature is opt-out for tracking - an underhanded ploy to take advantage of less knowledgeable users, thus favoring the ad sellers. A standard intended to protect customers should default to more protection, not less.
Google bulldozed the alleged standard through the W3C with great fanfare, leveraging its membership in the Digital Advertising Alliance and requesting Mozilla to support the proposal (Mozilla was getting good money from Google at the time, so they embraced the DNT scam, principles be damned). Of course, DNT was a failure in the market place, as expected. But it did succeed at its real goal, which was to bury all competing standard proposals which would have benefited customers.
As a proof of the deep duplicity of Google in regards to DNT, consider that Google never honored it, even though it was their own proposal.