Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Yahoo to ignore IE10's "Do Not Track"

ypolicyblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 96 posts

Re: Yahoo to ignore IE10's "Do Not Track"

#31

Post by technoslut »

theevocater wrote: post #11

I know people celebrated Microsoft's decision to do this in IE10, but this is what many of us were saying would happen. The relationship with the Do Not Track flag was always tenuous so flagrantly ignoring the spec (which indicates that default on is wrong) was simply going to cause companies to ignore the flag completely. Regardless, this whole thing is silliness in the extreme. I wonder if this means yahoo is going…

Advertising companies can be shameless. What makes you think they ever would have respected DNT even if was opt-out?

Re: Yahoo to ignore IE10's "Do Not Track"

#32

Post by fitztrev »

Issue aside, I'm curious about this site itself. The first thing I noticed is that they're running a pretty old version of WordPress. They're on 3.0.3 (December 2010) when the latest version is 3.4.2. For security purposes, I'm surprised they don't stay on top of that.

Also I was really confused if this was an official Yahoo site. No real mention anywhere on it. After some quick digging, it appears to be. But I'm surprised it's not hosted under the Yahoo.com domain somewhere.

Re: Yahoo to ignore IE10's "Do Not Track"

#33

Post by waterlesscloud »

ktsmith wrote: post #20
jlarocco wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words meaning they're not going to support it... "We're only going to support it if it's not turned on by default" is not really supporting DNT. It really shows they're business model depends on people being computer illiterate. And now that DNT is on by default they're revolting because they know few people will ever go out of their way to opt-in and get tracked.

> "We're only going to support it if it's not turned on by default" No, they are only going to support it if it is _actually_ the users intent, not a vendors intent. This is completely reasonable and the actions of MS are undermining the efforts to get this voluntary standard going. Keep in mind, DNT is completely voluntary.

What method are they using to determine if it's _actually_ the user's intent?

Re: Yahoo to ignore IE10's "Do Not Track"

#34

Post by ktsmith »

jlarocco wrote: post #29
ktsmith wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "We're only going to support it if it's not turned on by default" No, they are only going to support it if it is _actually_ the users intent, not a vendors intent. This is completely reasonable and the actions of MS are undermining the efforts to get this voluntary standard going. Keep in mind, DNT is completely voluntary.

One could just as easily argue that a user should only be tracked if it's their explicit intent to be tracked, in which case DNT should be on unless the user turns it off. That makes more sense to me, and I think a lot of people would agree. Obviously, Microsoft thinks that should be the case.

I have a hard time believing MS is doing this for their users benefit. It seems much more likely they think this will hurt Google.

Re: Yahoo to ignore IE10's "Do Not Track"

#35

Post by w1ntermute »

jlarocco wrote: post #15
ktsmith wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about DNT is that the advertising industry (not malicious/shady websites) are supportive of it as a voluntary standard that they will comply with it. All the major players are saying they won't play nicely with IE10 due to the default on flag instead of a default null (no intent expressed) flag.

In other words meaning they're not going to support it... "We're only going to support it if it's not turned on by default" is not really supporting DNT. It really shows they're business model depends on people being computer illiterate. And now that DNT is on by default they're revolting because they know few people will ever go out of their way to opt-in and get tracked.

Doesn't that make sense? If someone doesn't care enough to go in and turn on DNT, why does it matter if they're tracked? The default should obviously be 'null', that's the most equitable choice for all parties involved.

Re: Yahoo to ignore IE10's "Do Not Track"

#36

Post by ktsmith »

tvladeck wrote: post #26
ktsmith wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would still argue that a null value is arbitrary and does not map to the user's wishes. It's not arbitrary though, it clearly spells out that the browser vendor doesn't know what the users intent it.

Again, fair point - but then by definition the second clause of my statement is correct - the user's wishes are unknown, so any direction taken is then... arbitrary? :) At any rate, you seem well-versed in this area, so let me ask you a question: what is the difference the website's behavior between a "null" and a "track me, please" value in the header?

It's not binary, it's ternary. 1 opt out, 0 opt in, null unknown choice.

In practice the difference between null and don't track me please are probably non existent. However, in the future if this were to take off it's possible that someone would come up with creative benefits/uses for tracking that provide incentive for users to be tracked.

edit: Don't think I addressed your question. The difference between null or tracking ok and don't track are likely just to be generic advertisements shown to a user instead of targeted ads, the prevention of some back end selling of user interaction data and some other things that most people have no idea is going on. If you can't track users across sites you lose some of your ability to build up profiles for them. Advertisers will argue that the ads will have significantly less value without those secondary or tertiary ways to monetize eyeballs and I suppose you could see some decline in what advertisers are willing to pay for impressions. Ultimately I've been removed from advertising for a few years so I'm not entirely sure how much it will make a difference.

Re: Yahoo to ignore IE10's "Do Not Track"

#38

Post by johnq1337 »

ben0x539 wrote: post #25

I think it is perfectly reasonable to assume that users intend to not be tracked by the very large number of third parties they are involuntarily exposed to on the web. Yahoo are resorting to this whole buzzword-laden meaningless rhetoric around ~user experience~ and ~value proposition~. That just reinforces the impression that the only reason anyone was prepared to go along with DNT was that they assumed that 99% of…

I'm pretty sure that Microsoft is doing this to hurt Google and hurting Google's ability to deliver a better ad experience. As well, it gets to paint itself as fighting for privacy, etc, so it's a double-win for them.

Re: Yahoo to ignore IE10's "Do Not Track"

#39

Post by wonderyak »

> In our view, this degrades the experience for the majority of users and makes it hard to deliver on our value proposition to them.

I know Yahoo! has to maintain their business which depends on things like ads and content delivery; but to say it with such sterile marketing jargon just makes me nauseous.

How about you guys do what everyone else has had to do since the beginning; create something awesome and let people use it with a minimal barrier to entry. Right now, Yahoo! is like a giant skyscraper tenented only by iPhone case kiosks.

Re: Yahoo to ignore IE10's "Do Not Track"

#40

Post by dialtone »

ben0x539 wrote: post #25

I think it is perfectly reasonable to assume that users intend to not be tracked by the very large number of third parties they are involuntarily exposed to on the web. Yahoo are resorting to this whole buzzword-laden meaningless rhetoric around ~user experience~ and ~value proposition~. That just reinforces the impression that the only reason anyone was prepared to go along with DNT was that they assumed that 99% of…

How is a cookie 'just short of transmitting the user's SSN'? Microsoft itself, for example, doesn't support DNT for all browsers in its advertising network Atlas.
Post reply on HN