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How's Mozilla Doing with Do Not Track? Not So Good

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Re: How's Mozilla Doing with Do Not Track? Not So Good

#31
post #17

DNT is like putting a note atop your plain text file asking unintended recipients to ignore the contents. What browsers need is something akin to encryption, where you're not asking for compliance, you're denying access.

And yet, it seems to be some sort of meme in the enterprise world to have these sorts of things in every single email:

"Please note - This e-mail and any files transmitted with it may contain confidential or privileged information which is protected by legislation, copyright & the code of practice covering personal information. It is intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom it is addressed. If you have received this e-mail in error, please notify the originator. Any disclosure, copying, alteration, distribution, publication or the taking of action in reliance on the contents may be an offence."

as a random example. Bonus points for using it it in a footer, where almost by definition, you've read the email before seeing it.

I'm sure there's some legal justification for doing so, but it still strikes me as pretty stupid.

Re: How's Mozilla Doing with Do Not Track? Not So Good

#32
post #14

Why should people turn it on - when most people just don't care? That's the same problem we have in the EU right now. The correct way to deal with cookies would be for people to enable or disable them in their browser, according to their personal preferences. Instead, the EU forces their cookie legislation on everybody, because most people are too lazy to fix their preferences.

I disagree. I have no problem with a cookie that sets a completely anonymous option, or which tells the server that I'm on a certain state, or that I've been here already so don't show me X, show my Y instead. I only dislike tracking cookies.

Browsers have no way of deciding which cookies are tracking and which aren't, and disabling them all causes all kinds of problems, including with sessions. Legislation, on the other hand, is less 'blind' and lets websites using cookies for functionality the user required and/or is informed of (like sessions, preferences and such) without letting websites perform unauthorized tracking.

Re: How's Mozilla Doing with Do Not Track? Not So Good

#33
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> DNT is like putting a note atop your plain text file asking unintended recipients to ignore the contents. Well, robots.txt is a simple text file that politely asks robots to not spider parts of your website. It is completely voluntary and unenforceable, but works very well.

It is completely voluntary and unenforceable, but works very well. Ha! It works very well: for Google, and Yahoo. They use informative user-agents, and respect robots.txt directives. They have to, they're large corporations, with shareholders. Everybody else ignores it. Why would they listen? Live example: 216.55.185.45 - - [11/Sep/2011:06:50:56 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 4835 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:5.…

Maybe, but most tracking services are large corporations, most websites wouldn't embed analytics scripts from spammers-r-us.com.

Re: How's Mozilla Doing with Do Not Track? Not So Good

#34
post #3

The DNT initiative always reminded me of the "Evil Bit" joke: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt

I had the same reaction. It seems like DNT is more notable for reducing interest and effort in actual solutions. However, the EFF (whose opinion on this I'd trust) appears to indicate DNT is complimentary with things like AdBlock and IE's TPL's:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/03/tracking-protection-li...

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