Yahoo to ignore IE10's "Do Not Track" • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by ben0x539 » Sat, Oct 27, 2012, 3:04 AM UTC

thematt wrote: post #58

patrickmay wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think rather than squabbling about DNT, browser vendors should be taking much more aggressive, technical steps to make tracking users harder Exactly. Do Not Track is unenforceable. We need Cannot Track.

You already have it. Use the following Chrome extensions: NoScript, AdBlock, Ghostery and Do Not Track Plus. There's no sense in relying in any of the large companies to voluntarily give up ad revenue, you need to take matters in to your own hands.

With Firefox, I use adblockplus, noscript and requestpolicy, along with some thing I forgot that wipes flash cookies and other persistent storage at the end of every session, and probably something else that I entirely forgot about.

But that does fuck all, apart from making me guess which third-party requests are instrumental to making a page I'm visiting for the first time properly, until it's some sort of concerted effort at a default behavior for browsers so that websites are coerced to adapt to it to stay competitive. So it's up to those with browser marketshare.

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

#82

Post by pbiggar » Sat, Oct 27, 2012, 3:04 AM UTC

ihsw wrote: post #80

pbiggar wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that no-one would click them. We barely click on ads tailors to our behaviour - we'll never click on ads that aren't (and we never did).

Personally I'm fine with that.

Unfortunately, if nobody pays for the content, it will go away. That's probably bad (lets leave aside discussions of how high the quality on ad-supported content is, and presume that there are people who like to read it).

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

#83

Post by callahad » Sat, Oct 27, 2012, 4:01 AM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #67

powertower wrote: post #19

> Recently, Microsoft unilaterally decided to turn on DNT in Internet Explorer 10 by default, rather than at users’ direction. > It basically means that the DNT signal from IE10 doesn’t express user intent. Blatantly false. Not only are you presented with the option to turn off DNT on first use (that takes up the entire screen), but I'd imagine users would choose to have advertisers track them about 1-10% of the time…

The hilarious part is that they believe no DNT signal does express an intent to be tracked. Heads, they win. Tails, you lose.

That's incorrect. DNT has three states: True, False, and null (omitted). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_not_track_header

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

#84

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Oct 27, 2012, 4:08 AM UTC

teuobk wrote: post #10

This is surprising, given that Microsoft is the provider of ads on Yahoo Search (and perhaps other properties).

[deleted]

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

#85

Post by jlarocco » Sat, Oct 27, 2012, 4:19 AM UTC

ktsmith wrote: post #34

jlarocco wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Next you'll tell me corporations mainly donate to charity for tax purposes and free publicity...

I don't care if they're really doing it to hurt Google. Increased privacy for users is a good thing.

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

#86

Post by calbear81 » Sat, Oct 27, 2012, 7:08 AM UTC

It's obvious that Microsoft doesn't have as much to lose with a DNT default setting in IE10 when their profit center is tied to Windows and business software. They have MSN.com and Bing but both are money losers and at this point, hurting Google and Yahoo might be a better strategy even if it means "cutting off your nose to smite your face". They also hope that this will stem the defects from IE and help sell more Windows 8 upgrades and Surface tablets in general.

In regards to how people feel about tracking, people are always asked in isolation about tracking and of course everyone say's they hate it and they don't want to be tracked. The better question is asking them if they will accept the alternative. Scared of Facebook? Put a $5 fee per month to replace lost ad revenues and users will depart en masse. The reality is a big chunk of the internet and the services people rely on, love, and use daily are ad supported and if given the alternative of a free ad supported model vs. a paid model, they would choose ad supported.

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

#87

Post by grannyg00se » Sat, Oct 27, 2012, 9:02 AM UTC

qxcv wrote: post #60

grannyg00se wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious, what's your beef with user-agent?

Two problems with UA strings: 1) They can often be used to identify you, especially when combined with other HTTP headers or information scraped from the client via JS[0]. 2) They are abused by web developers who wish to lock out web browsers that they do not support. This is generally considered to be against the spirit of the web, though is sometimes useful for optimising page load times (for example, not sending I…

Thanks. I didn't realize that the combination of headers could produce such a specific target. Apparently my browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 2,474,746 tested so far.

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

#88

Post by icebraining » Sat, Oct 27, 2012, 9:10 AM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #73

geofft wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the benefits of the DNT scheme The benefit of the DNT scheme was to kill the lie that most users don't care. If 99% of users take positive action to change a default and say "Don't track me", it's believable. If a browser vendor says this, it's not. Bear in mind that Do Not Track has _zero_ technical merit; it's equivalent to the "evil bit" prank RFC. Any merit it has must be political. The value in DNT was going t…

That puts Microsoft in a bind. Sensible defaults are important; if you can guess what users want most of the time, then you should just do that. In their shoes I would have done some focus groups, spending an afternoon with people and really educating them on the details of tracking, and what the pros and cons are for them. If at the end of it most typical users would have turned it on, then this would have been the…

If Yahoo's right, then presumably most people would turn DNT off, or make an exception for them.

Nope, there are other reasons why one wouldn't turn it off: confusion, ignorance, laziness, etc. Everyone in tech support knows how hard it is to get users to perform simple tasks even with step-by-step guidance.

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

#89

Post by icebraining » Sat, Oct 27, 2012, 9:12 AM UTC

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 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.

I don't. In my limited experience, most users don't care nor mind unless they can see the immediate downsides to that.

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

#90

Post by icebraining » Sat, Oct 27, 2012, 9:14 AM UTC

thematt wrote: post #58

patrickmay wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think rather than squabbling about DNT, browser vendors should be taking much more aggressive, technical steps to make tracking users harder Exactly. Do Not Track is unenforceable. We need Cannot Track.

You already have it. Use the following Chrome extensions: NoScript, AdBlock, Ghostery and Do Not Track Plus. There's no sense in relying in any of the large companies to voluntarily give up ad revenue, you need to take matters in to your own hands.

How does that prevent ETag based tracking? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_ETag#Tracking_using_ETags