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How's Mozilla Doing with Do Not Track? Not So Good

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Re: How's Mozilla Doing with Do Not Track? Not So Good

#11

Post by tomelders »

Xuzz wrote: post #6

Most of us on Hacker News, from what I can tell, are generally against legislating the Internet. But, that's exactly what DNT requires to be effective, since it provides no technical barrier against tracking: either websites are legislated into being required to honor it, or it has essentially no value to users. As much as privacy is important, I'm actually glad that Chrome doesn't support DNT. Hopefully that will gi…

I don't see that this would require legislating the internet. Instead, amendments to things such as data-protection, privacy or human rights legislation should be able to cover it.

Re: How's Mozilla Doing with Do Not Track? Not So Good

#13

Post by justinschuh »

tomelders wrote: post #11
Xuzz wrote: post #6

Most of us on Hacker News, from what I can tell, are generally against legislating the Internet. But, that's exactly what DNT requires to be effective, since it provides no technical barrier against tracking: either websites are legislated into being required to honor it, or it has essentially no value to users. As much as privacy is important, I'm actually glad that Chrome doesn't support DNT. Hopefully that will gi…

I don't see that this would require legislating the internet. Instead, amendments to things such as data-protection, privacy or human rights legislation should be able to cover it.

This doesn't strike me as a legitimate difference (even just semantically). It doesn't matter if it's amended to existing legislation or passed as new law; both are the same from the perspective of "legislating the Internet."

Re: How's Mozilla Doing with Do Not Track? Not So Good

#14

Post by gst »

Why should people turn it on - when most people just don't care?

That's the same problem we have in the EU right now. The correct way to deal with cookies would be for people to enable or disable them in their browser, according to their personal preferences. Instead, the EU forces their cookie legislation on everybody, because most people are too lazy to fix their preferences.

Re: How's Mozilla Doing with Do Not Track? Not So Good

#15

Post by barrkel »

gst wrote: post #14

Why should people turn it on - when most people just don't care? That's the same problem we have in the EU right now. The correct way to deal with cookies would be for people to enable or disable them in their browser, according to their personal preferences. Instead, the EU forces their cookie legislation on everybody, because most people are too lazy to fix their preferences.

It's precisely because grandmothers are "too lazy to fix their preferences" that governments step in.

Re: How's Mozilla Doing with Do Not Track? Not So Good

#16

Post by SoftwareMaven »

gst wrote: post #14

Why should people turn it on - when most people just don't care? That's the same problem we have in the EU right now. The correct way to deal with cookies would be for people to enable or disable them in their browser, according to their personal preferences. Instead, the EU forces their cookie legislation on everybody, because most people are too lazy to fix their preferences.

Most people have no idea what a "cookie" is, nor how or why they should manage them. Calling people lazy for not managing them is the epitome of engineering arrogance. Browsers need better, more clear, interfaces for managing cookies and websites need to provide easily parses info on what each cookie is for before people will even be able to manage them.

Re: How's Mozilla Doing with Do Not Track? Not So Good

#18

Post by azakai »

hexis wrote: post #17

DNT is like putting a note atop your plain text file asking unintended recipients to ignore the contents. What browsers need is something akin to encryption, where you're not asking for compliance, you're denying access.

> DNT is like putting a note atop your plain text file asking unintended recipients to ignore the contents.

Well, robots.txt is a simple text file that politely asks robots to not spider parts of your website.

It is completely voluntary and unenforceable, but works very well.

Re: How's Mozilla Doing with Do Not Track? Not So Good

#19

Post by qjz »

azakai wrote: post #18
hexis wrote: post #17

DNT is like putting a note atop your plain text file asking unintended recipients to ignore the contents. What browsers need is something akin to encryption, where you're not asking for compliance, you're denying access.

> DNT is like putting a note atop your plain text file asking unintended recipients to ignore the contents. Well, robots.txt is a simple text file that politely asks robots to not spider parts of your website. It is completely voluntary and unenforceable, but works very well.

How can you tell it works? How do you know the bot owners aren't returning to crawl those parts with User-Agent strings that impersonate ordinary users?

Re: How's Mozilla Doing with Do Not Track? Not So Good

#20

Post by dsl »

gwern wrote: post #10
endtwist wrote: post #3

The DNT initiative always reminded me of the "Evil Bit" joke: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt

Somewhat surprisingly, some 'evil bits' like the .xxx TLD, seem to be getting traction.

It is only gaining traction from people who want the bit explicitly turned off. People are lining up to pay $100 and change to prevent coca-cola.xxx and nike.xxx from being registered. Not a single person I've talked to in adult is seriously considering a move to .xxx
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