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Twitter abandons 'Do Not Track' privacy protection

zdnet.com

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Re: Twitter abandons 'Do Not Track' privacy protection

#91

Post by qb45 »

lloeki wrote: post #71
xg15 wrote: post #13

Ok, honestly, was DNT ever more than a smoke grenade for muddying the privacy discussion? The standard always relied on every single shady data collector out there to act against their core interest, facing not even the risk of detection (let alone punishment) if they don't comply, all just because you asked them nicely. You might as well carry a "do not rob me" card in your wallet. Was there ever a honest belief by…

Ever seen those "here we'll be setting cookies because we're going to track you if you agree (agree/fuck off)" in Europe? A EU directive or something of the best intent mandates that when you're tracking someone beyond technical needs this boilerplate is required before setting a cookie. Guess what if you disagree there's no way to store the user's answer, so the box keeps popping up, forever nagging the privacy cons…

The problem is that most of these websites offer no "fuck off" option besides GTFO and usually "agree" is the only button provided and they are probably tracking you from the get go before you even click anything.

If you now mandated them to respect some special HTTP header instead, most of them would simply 403 all browsers with this header set and you would have to disable it to access these sites. So same thing as with JavaScript and cookies - either tolerate crap or stop using a dozen websites or install yet another extension for management of per-site exceptions.

This law is silly and completely detached from reality. They should either prohibit tracking by law or do nothing.

Re: Twitter abandons 'Do Not Track' privacy protection

#92

Post by problems »

qb45 wrote: post #73
rbg246 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure one one can make their 'own' conclusions from reading that article it was clearly biased towards reaching the conclusion that Ayn Rand was a writer for 'juveniles' which I don't think is a fair appraisal. I mean I don't agree with her conclusions on the world but I would say the world she has created in her novels are at a higher level than juvenile reading.

Why, I enjoyed this article, particularly the part about rape and the end: I seriously doubt that Donald Trump is really a fan of Ayn Rand. Her books may be juvenile and shallow, but they’re way too deep for him. Make your own conclusions, indeed. Heather Digby Parton, also known as "Digby," is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism. Um, I only…

Salon is a very left-wing site, heavily opinion-based. You get about the same kind of thing when looking at opinion sites from any part of the political spectrum.

It's glorified trash talking really.

Re: Twitter abandons 'Do Not Track' privacy protection

#93

Post by stordoff »

shuntress wrote: post #78
politician wrote: post #55

(Kicking around an idea to build this:) Would anybody be interested in a local DNS server that automatically updated its list of black-holed domains through a mechanism that preserved your privacy? (Assuming, of course, a decentralized representation of the block lists.) Would anybody be willing to sell their attention by accepting payment (BTC), perhaps through a dutch auction, to re-enable a black-holed domain for…

If you don't already know about it, definitely check out https://pi-hole.net/ I'm not totally clear on where their blacklist comes from but their mainpage claims "Known ad-serving domains are pulled from third party sources and compiled into one list" This is pretty much exactly your first suggestion and seems like it would be an excellent platform on which to launch your second suggestion.

Default block lists appear to be: https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole/wiki/Customising-sources-...

The most comprehensive of the lists appears to be https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts , which is the same list I use for DNS filtering on my DD-WRT router. Seems to work pretty well.

Re: Twitter abandons 'Do Not Track' privacy protection

#94

Post by criddell »

Chaebixi wrote: post #74
criddell wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is pretty much no practical way to be sure you aren't actually being tracked. The amount of metadata we spew is crazy.

> The amount of metadata we spew is crazy. Could someone build a privacy-respecting browser that "spews" super-generic metadata that doesn't vary from installation to installation? It's probably have fewer "features," but I'd honestly kinda welcome a simpler browser experience.

I think there are plugins (or extensions? never understood the difference) that will alter outgoing headers.

Re: Twitter abandons 'Do Not Track' privacy protection

#95

Post by eli »

xg15 wrote: post #13

Ok, honestly, was DNT ever more than a smoke grenade for muddying the privacy discussion? The standard always relied on every single shady data collector out there to act against their core interest, facing not even the risk of detection (let alone punishment) if they don't comply, all just because you asked them nicely. You might as well carry a "do not rob me" card in your wallet. Was there ever a honest belief by…

I think most companies make an honest effort to abide by their own Privacy Policies.

Google might listen to DNT, or it might ignore DNT, but I don't think they'd ever pretend to listen to DNT and then do something different. They'd get sued for sure.

Re: Twitter abandons 'Do Not Track' privacy protection

#96

Post by StevePerkins »

qb45 wrote: post #57
xg15 wrote: post #13

Ok, honestly, was DNT ever more than a smoke grenade for muddying the privacy discussion? The standard always relied on every single shady data collector out there to act against their core interest, facing not even the risk of detection (let alone punishment) if they don't comply, all just because you asked them nicely. You might as well carry a "do not rob me" card in your wallet. Was there ever a honest belief by…

What's up with this "Ayn Rand fanboys" meme? I keep seeing this recently and this time I can't even imagine how it could be relevant.

Pretty much just Reddit leaking into HN.

Some people live in a political/cultural "tribe", and see the entire world through a prism where everything they dislike is linked to "the other tribe". They often punctuate every paragraph with some meme jab at the other tribe, even if it's seemingly irrelevant for everyone else who doesn't share the same prism.

On Reddit, this results in imaginary Internet points (i.e. upvotes), which reinforces the behavior and the underlying mindset. The HN community is better, but still not immune to this. I'm convinced that the "gamification" of online discussion over the past ten years has pretty deep impacts that future generations will look back on someday.

Re: Twitter abandons 'Do Not Track' privacy protection

#97

Post by Crespyl »

staticassertion wrote: post #38
dudus wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. If any Good citizen site ever thought about honoring DNT they got their plans crushed when Microsoft did this. It was a silly proposal from the start but a hopeful one. Hopeful that people would do the right thing. The web was always built on assumptions that the other side would do the right thing in that context DNT was not so silly. This one failed. Because Microsoft didn't do the right thing. They decided t…

I think you're putting too much blame on Microsoft here. DNT was always garbage, the fact that as soon as anyone used it (it becoming default for IE being the push in this case) it would fall apart just shows that it was always doomed. Shouldn't not being tracked be the default? Shouldn't we be opting into targeted ads, not out of them? Seems reasonable, if DNT weren't garbage, to have it be on by default. But it was…

I think you're right that "not being tracked" should be the default, in so much as having an adblocker and blacklisting known trackers should be defaults. These are things that my user-agent should be doing automatically to protect me and improve my experience.

On the other hand, DNT is intended to be an opt-in polite request for other agents to change their usual behavior. An adblocker or tracking blocker at the browser/user-agent level does nothing to change how the servers that I do connect to behave. It just alters the behavior of my browser to not contact at all unrelated third parties.

With DNT, my user-agent still contacts those third parties, but with a request to alter their default behavior. "Please, give me adco.com/somead, but please don't correlate this request with other information you have on me, etc."

I do think there's a possible place for something like that, but it has to be opt-in or nobody will listen to it. Trivial examples of other "please deviate from your default behavior" requests are things like "show desktop version" on mobile browsers, Accept/Accept-Language (where supported), etc.

On the gripping hand, it's also yet another bit to differentiate me from everyone else, and expecting polite and ethical behavior from advertising corporations probably really is doomed to failure.

Re: Twitter abandons 'Do Not Track' privacy protection

#98

Post by eli »

malikNF wrote: post #9

DNT made sense only in a world where there would be some sort of law to back it up. I actually had my adblocker turned off on websites I knew at least tried to respect DNT (reddit, medium and twitter), guess twitter's getting completely adblocked now.

Maybe. I think in practice that would have eventually led to "disable DNT in order to access Facebook, etc."

Re: Twitter abandons 'Do Not Track' privacy protection

#99

Post by [deleted] »

eli wrote: post #95
xg15 wrote: post #13

Ok, honestly, was DNT ever more than a smoke grenade for muddying the privacy discussion? The standard always relied on every single shady data collector out there to act against their core interest, facing not even the risk of detection (let alone punishment) if they don't comply, all just because you asked them nicely. You might as well carry a "do not rob me" card in your wallet. Was there ever a honest belief by…

I think most companies make an honest effort to abide by their own Privacy Policies. Google might listen to DNT, or it might ignore DNT, but I don't think they'd ever pretend to listen to DNT and then do something different. They'd get sued for sure.

[deleted]

Re: Twitter abandons 'Do Not Track' privacy protection

#100

Post by thesuitonym »

Omniusaspirer wrote: post #82
Chaebixi wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I keep seeing this recently and this time I can't even imagine how it could be relevant. In this case, it sounds like it's mocking the idea that the market-based voluntary agreements could solve this problem. Lots of people seem to think you can solve any problem by just "letting the market work."

The market is working very well on advertisements. They grow increasingly obnoxious, and the adblockers keep getting better and more prevalent in response. The end result is either reasonable ads (probably too late for this) or the death of this particular flavor of the ad-driven revenue model. I fully expect we'll look back on Internet advertising as a bootstrapper for the early Internet economy as opposed to a last…

I'd love to believe that, but I felt much the same way in the double-dickities, when popups and popunders were rampant, and popup blockers started becoming common place. Eventually, only the oldest and least tech literate of people still had browsers that allowed popups, and they started to go away. It seemed like advertising like that was going away, but it didn't, it just changed, and instead of opening in a new window, it just opens as a DIV in the same one. Only this time it's controlled by the same javascript that is required to make the site even work, so it probably won't ever go away.
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