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What is Do Not Track (DNT)? An illustrated guide

whatisdnt.com

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Re: What is Do Not Track (DNT)? An illustrated guide

#2

Post by city41 »

I was hoping for DDG to go into the technical side of DNT at least a little bit, even at a very high and simple level. But really this is just an ad for DDG that's mostly based on instilling fear. I didn't find it very effective.

EDIT: to be fair, the sister site: http://donttrack.us/, is closer to what I was expecting. But still vague and still feels like it's just trying to instill fear.

Re: What is Do Not Track (DNT)? An illustrated guide

#3

Post by dguido »

It seems odd that DNT is a controlled at the browser-level and turning it on instructs every site to "not track me" (whatever that means). There are some sites that I want to be tracked by and DNT is an all-or-nothing control. This seems really poorly thought out.

There's a tenuous relationship between DNT and DuckDuckGo too. On one hand you've got a small group of unknowns who profess not to keep logs (but who knows, right?) and on the other you have a slapdash attempt to regulate the ad industry. Use DuckDuckGo because it's a good search engine.

Re: What is Do Not Track (DNT)? An illustrated guide

#4

Post by yegg »

city41 wrote: post #2

I was hoping for DDG to go into the technical side of DNT at least a little bit, even at a very high and simple level. But really this is just an ad for DDG that's mostly based on instilling fear. I didn't find it very effective. EDIT: to be fair, the sister site: http://donttrack.us/ , is closer to what I was expecting. But still vague and still feels like it's just trying to instill fear.

We struggled with this actually, but the technical reality is that it currently means nothing to the point that it might as well do nothing technically. And that's the point of the site -- not to scare, but to say this setting that is now in your browser doesn't do anything, and even when and if it does, it isn't likely to do what you think it does, i.e. not track you.

Here's the current state: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/29/technology/mediator-appoin...

Basically, the talks have completely broken down to the point the advertisers are delegitimizing the W3C proposals, which are incidentally not finalized either.

And you have the big sites waiting on the sidelines and explicitly telling people they're doing nothing: https://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an...

Twitter is the exception: https://support.twitter.com/articles/20169453#

So you have this setting out there in the wild in all the major browsers that literally does close to nothing.

Re: What is Do Not Track (DNT)? An illustrated guide

#5

Post by glenjamin »

Where did do-no-track even come from?

If I were to create a browser extension which added a "Do-Not-Charge-Me" header, without input from retailers, would I then be able to get annoyed that I still had to pay for my goods, despite having ticked a little box in the browser settings?

Re: What is Do Not Track (DNT)? An illustrated guide

#6

Post by Millennium »

dguido wrote: post #3

It seems odd that DNT is a controlled at the browser-level and turning it on instructs every site to "not track me" (whatever that means). There are some sites that I want to be tracked by and DNT is an all-or-nothing control. This seems really poorly thought out. There's a tenuous relationship between DNT and DuckDuckGo too. On one hand you've got a small group of unknowns who profess not to keep logs (but who knows…

DNT is really not much more than an HTTP header. Browsers could be set up to send that header to some sites and not others, and that behavior could be made configurable.

Re: What is Do Not Track (DNT)? An illustrated guide

#7

Post by mtgx »

dguido wrote: post #3

It seems odd that DNT is a controlled at the browser-level and turning it on instructs every site to "not track me" (whatever that means). There are some sites that I want to be tracked by and DNT is an all-or-nothing control. This seems really poorly thought out. There's a tenuous relationship between DNT and DuckDuckGo too. On one hand you've got a small group of unknowns who profess not to keep logs (but who knows…

Agreed. And DNT does give me a false sense of security. I set it on, and then I just imagine that no ad agency can track me anymore. This is not just a theory. It's exactly what I intuitively thought when I clicked "on" for it, even though I know that's not really what it does. But that's all the pro-DNT marketing made me feel about it.

I should at least be able to see a log of what ads or links I blocked using DNT. Otherwise it's all pretty pointless.

Re: What is Do Not Track (DNT)? An illustrated guide

#8

Post by prisonblues »

I set out my take on this 'what is DNT' question in an article I wrote - http://www.kemplittle.com/publications/item.aspx?ListName=KL...

It's a bit heavier going that the DDG approach, and more euro-centric, but hopefully gives a decent understanding.

Any feedback or comments encouraged.

Re: What is Do Not Track (DNT)? An illustrated guide

#9

Post by 4ad »

glenjamin wrote: post #5

Where did do-no-track even come from? If I were to create a browser extension which added a "Do-Not-Charge-Me" header, without input from retailers, would I then be able to get annoyed that I still had to pay for my goods, despite having ticked a little box in the browser settings?

I don't understand why you are being downvoted because what you said is true. It's just the latest incarnation of the evil bit[1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_bit

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