W3C Rejects Ad Industry's Do-Not-Track Proposal 162
itwbennett writes "The W3C's Tracking Protection Working Group, which is mainly concerned with standardizing the mechanisms for server-side compliance with do-not-track requests, has rejected a proposal by from the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) that would have allowed advertisers to continue profiling users who had asked not to be tracked. The proposal would also have allowed them to 'retarget' ads to those users by showing ads relevant to one site or transaction on all subsequent sites they visited, according to the co-chairs of the W3C's Tracking Protection Working Group. The working group co-chairs also said that they planned to reject proposals similar to those made by the DAA."
Re:Is it true Apache webservers block DNT? (Score:5, Informative)
Here [arstechnica.com] is an article on it from Ars Technica, for anyone who thinks I'm making this shit up.
Re:Do Not Track... (Score:4, Informative)
Request Policy complements noscript quite nicely, as it allows you to restrict access to third party domains. E.g., by default, requests from example.net to adserv.example.com are rejected.
Re:Not useless, but its usefulness is now over (Score:5, Informative)
Careful, advertisers like Google have paid Adblock Plus to whitelist their ads [techcrunch.com]. Sure it's google ads today, but Google owns the vast majority of online ad networks and commands practically all the online ad markets, and if they're paying off the ad blockers to whitelist...
And of course, Google is naturally tracking you. Especially whitelisted.
It depends. Sites depend on ads to pay for content and hosting, and many with "premium" options do not allow talk of ad blockers as well. Even reputable ones - like Ars Technica. Even the merest hint of ad blocking without whitelisting the site in question is out. I got banned for mentioning noscript and didn't even mention blocking the site's ads, just it happened to block a good chunk of ads.
Of course, one side effect of this is sites get desperate for money and they end up getting sold and re-sold to other companies. It's only a matter of time before pretty much online ads disappear as we know them because websites are all purchased up and owned by a few media conglomerates who bought them for the user information and all that.
Of course, the little guy with a blog who wants to make a couple of bucks won't be able to attract any advertisers because they all went to the big guys with their massive data pools from buying up websites left and right.
Re:Is it true Apache webservers block DNT? (Score:4, Informative)
That happened last year, but it was only for a month. The patch to disregard DNT from IE was actually made by one of the authors of the DNT standard in response to IE catastrophically mutilating the standard, but they soon decided that messing with Apache wasn't appropriate and reverted the patch.
Re:Not useless, but its usefulness is now over (Score:5, Informative)
Careful, advertisers like Google have paid Adblock Plus to whitelist their ads
Sure, but ABP has an easy-to-find checkbox to enable/disable whitelisted ads. There are also many other ad blockers out there that can be used if ABP ever stops working effectively (and being easy to configure).
Re:Not useless, but its usefulness is now over (Score:4, Informative)
Analytics doesn't track you across websites. It really does very little beyond what server logs provide. The one advantage is a cookie that says you are a repeat visitor. Also it is a same domain cookie so no other sites can access it. Google does have access to the data but its not attached to a unique record so they can't build an individual profile for you.
The same is true for Coremetrics and Omniture.