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

[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc748

Well, the argument from the advertisers is this: they have no idea whether or not people want to be tracked, so they don't know when it is not OK to do so (i.e. they are claiming to be autistic). Maybe some people really do want to be tracked and given advertisements that are more relevant to their interests, according to the advertisers, and so having browsers block tracking systems would hurt those users; also, they like to remind us, invasive advertising funds the web (but I have my doubts about that point). DNT is supposed to give users a way to opt out of invasive advertising that does not involve simply blocking ads; we are supposed to accept this compromise, because otherwise we'll just be in another arms race (which I suspect we will win, given how effective ABP is at blocking ads).

The theory is that the industry can self-regulate, because we are holding the Sword of Damocles over their heads: we already showed them that we can block pop-ups, pop-unders, hover ads, Flash ads, Java ads, and the numerous other things they came up with. We also showed them that we can win an arms race, by making spam filters so effective that the volume of spam actually began to decrease.

Of course, for DNT to work, the number of ABP installations would have to spike whenever the advertisers prove that they are not acting in good faith. Which is what they did when they tried to claim that DNT meant users don't want to see targeted ads, but that it was still OK to collect tracking data. To me, that suggests that DNT is already over and that we need to finish the game by making ABP a standard feature.

Things were looking pretty good for the industry embracing self regulation where advertisers would agree to respect the user's wishes and the user's wishes would be expressed by users making an explicit request through the DNT setting in their browsers.

Then Microsoft negated all that industry self-regulation progress by flipping the switch without user intervention. This undermined the beginnings of an agreement that would have advertisers respect the wishes of users voluntarily.

I don't understand their motivation -- maybe MS was counting on legislation to require advertisers to respect DNT, or maybe they saw this as a way to scuttle the talks between Mozilla, other privacy advocates, and the ad industry. Microsoft does, after all, have similar interests to Google in tracking users for advertising purposes. Maybe they just thought the PR win from telling people who didn't understand the DNT conversation that they were "private by default" was going to help them take back users from Firefox and Chrome (even though their move to do that undermined the whole effort.)

Those are just guesses at their motivation, but I cannot come up with any better explanations. Can you?

Think about it from a game theoretical perspective. How can they lose?

1) They get to pretend they're protecting users. Look at us we turned on Do Not Track by default (because you're too stupid to do it yourself, naturally -- wait, sorry, you're not stupid, come back)!

2) It makes their competitors look like they're not protecting users as much as Microsoft claims they are. Look how sinister Google is, they don't even turn on Do Not Track by default in their web browser. And Mozilla is therefore just as evil (notwithstanding that they're a nonprofit with a far less clear incentive than Microsoft to want to track you and pretty unambiguously have it turned off by default as a result of realism rather than malice), so doesn't that just make you want to come back to Windows and Internet Explorer?

3) If they manage to scuttle Do Not Track, yay! Now they get to keep tracking the people who use Bing, etc.

4) When having it turned on by default becomes the obvious deal breaker everyone expected it to be when taking part in a voluntary consensus-based process with advertisers, the subsequent falling apart of talks makes the advertisers look like dirtbags, which falls right into Microsoft's narrative of trying to make any of their ad-funded competitors (but especially Google) look like they're constantly doing something sinister.

5) If they don't manage to scuttle Do Not Track, yay! It's on by default in Internet Explorer. This hurts Microsoft's online services, but it likely hurts their competitors more, and Microsoft has historically been very successful with a strategy based on destroying competitors.

Realistically, the response to Microsoft turning it on by default should have been extremely simple: Make the spec say that the browser must have it turned off by default, and then allow websites to ignore the flag whenever the browser implementation doesn't comply with the spec. Then Microsoft can do whatever they want, but if they do the thing that breaks the consensus then the flag is no longer respected, but just for Internet Explorer users. Everyone else gets the same Do Not Track that everyone else agreed was a good idea, and Microsoft's strategy backfires because now their browser is the least privacy-protecting one since even the users who actually want to turn it on can't when all advertisers are ignoring the flag just with Internet Explorer.

If we must make an analogy, it might be more like, "please don't sell photos of my house without my approval." But even that isn't a good analogy because houses aren't people vising websites.