Do Not Track is not respected on mozilla.org

Do Not Track is not respected on mozilla.org
bugzilla.mozilla.org

For example: You come on to my site, I want to know how you're using it, I don't want your personal details, I just want to see how you're interacting with the site I've made for you. Why do I want to know? Well it depends on the purpose of the site, but for the most part it is so that I can optimise and improve what my site offers to you and others.

But you've politely requested that I don't track you. For starters this should only ever be a polite request, not a forced rejection of any tracking scripts. I have a right to track how people use my site. You have a right to privacy, but that's got bugger all to do with you coming on to my site, once you've made that choice you are within my domain, under my roof, living by my rules. Until you leave of course.

Some sites may respect that request, but they're the kind of site who have no need to track behaviour anyhow, and are likely not tracking to begin with. kind of makes the request moot.

People get way too offended by analytics tracking when it's there for their benefit. The internet would be one ugly place if webmasters and designers had no clue how people were interacting with it. If you want to go back to the dark ages then feel free to try. But you won't benefit from the advances we've made or are yet to make because of large scale, anonymous tracking across the web.

I've no respect for Do Not Track. It is a silly, backwards, progress-endangering concept that should be burnt on a pyre.

Think of a scenario where a site is maliciously tracking you, where a forced browser level request could to not track be sent, and maybe we'll talk. But then again I'll probably just retort that any malicious tracking will have a way around such a forced request, and so it's pointless.

Do Not Track is snake oil for the conscientious objector.

  "once you've made that choice you are within my domain"

If I'm visiting a site that talks about rocketry and I'm suddenly being served ads for fishing lures and rods because 10 minutes prior, I was searching for fishing reels, it feels creepy. And it's entirely your opinion that feeling creepy about being served ads for something I'm not currently looking at is wanting "to go back to the dark ages".

Take it in another way. If I'm visiting a flea market on Saturday morning and going by some stalls that sell home made cookies and such, I'm fine getting a flyer for pastries, donuts and cakes. I'm not fine getting a flyer for an 18 pack of socks at the cookie stall because Friday night after work, I went shopping for boxers at a completely different place.

Since many advertisers seem to have the Zuckerberg mindset when it comes to privacy and the mere notion of wanting to remain "un-caterered to" no matter how helpful and in my benefit you think it is, we're forced to take measures into our own hands.

BTW... Mozilla.org not respecting Do Not Track is exactly what I expected since they've decided that my request is needless considering what they produce.

Specifically, it's to do with third party cookies, not any particular site.

If I visit someone's website, I'm usually perfectly happy for them to record my visit and my actions. If, on the other hand, I visit their website and some invisible actor (say, an advertiser) also tracks me, then it becomes insidious, especially if that other invisible actor is active on multiple sites.

This gets a bit blurred when you've got large vendors with multiple presences. For example, years ago when you logged into Hotmail, you'd be briefly redirected via passport.com (then live.com), and then directed back to Hotmail. Similarly, going to Microsoft's web page, or MSN's, or Technet, or any other site in the Microsoft stable, would redirect via the same site. This gave them single-sign-on, but also allowed them to "track" your activity across the entire network. That behaviour is used by many other large organisations such as Google.

However, it's also made its way into other large sites like Facebook and Twitter, because sites like that have "social media buttons" appearning on sites that aren't served by those sites but are served by Facebook and Twitter, so becoming third-party objects, and doing the same sort of pervasive insidious tracking across multiple domains and web properties.

The thing is, Google Analytics (as mentioned in the article) is such a pervasive ubiquitous invisible actor, but it's damn useful, so lots of people want to use it. The problem is that it's a third party object, and it's of massive benefit to Google too, not just the site owner.

So, where "do not track" fails is in distinguishing between "tracking" that's acceptable to many people, and "tracking" that's somewhat more invisible and pervasive. Switching it all off is harmful to the internet, but until it's sold correctly, it won't be acceptable otherwise.