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Chrome To Get 'Do Not Track' 111

puddingebola tips news that support for the 'do-not-track' privacy setting will soon be coming to Google Chrome. The feature was implemented for Chromium v23.0.1266.0 in a recent revision. Google has said DNT will make it into the public release of Chrome by the end of year. This will bring Chrome up to speed with Firefox, which has had it for a while, and IE 10, which will have it turned on by default. As for why Google is the last of the three do implement it, the LA Times points out a post earlier this year from Google's Susan Wojcicki: 'There’s been a lot of debate over the last few years about personalization on the web. We believe that tailoring your web experience — for example by showing you more relevant, interest-based ads, or making it easy to recommend stuff you like to friends — is a good thing.'"
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Chrome To Get 'Do Not Track'

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  • Translation (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RaceProUK ( 1137575 ) on Saturday September 15, 2012 @02:46PM (#41347657)
    "DNT will hurt our advertising revenue"
    • by mysidia ( 191772 )

      That would be an anti-Google biased way of looking at it.

      Just because Firefox implemented an experimental DNT functionality that may become part of a future standard, does not necessarily mean that DNT should be a development priority for other browsers. It makes good sense to wait until the DNT standardization effort is completed, and see as to its fate, before investing time and $$$ on wasted development effort in creating implementation that then needs to be rewritten or massively overhauled soon after,

      • Wow, that's one hell of a response for a post that was (parttially at least) in jest. I think you took one too many ProPlus.
      • by benjymouse ( 756774 ) on Saturday September 15, 2012 @04:21PM (#41348135)

        The user is presented with a "setup" screen at which he/she can choose "express" or "advanced" setup.

        The screen *clearly* spells out that *if* you choose express settings then DNT will be switched on.

        You are confounding default settings (settings which take effect unless you explicitly go through a change) with a *choice* of grouped settings.

        Yes, the settings are grouped. Yes, the users may not know what exactly could be the benefits of tracking (or the benefits to Google?).

        But, the user actually *do* make a choice. It is not like the screen merely says "express or advanced?". It actually outlines what will be set.

        To claims that this is "default" and that the user has not made a choice is simply wrong. It is the *easy* choice, but that is not the same.

        Advertisers and their shills like Roy Fielding may not like the fact that the process does stack the deck against tracking as it makes the DNT the easy choice. To me that is just "right back at ya!". Thanks for all your toolbars, btw. But no thanks.

        • by mysidia ( 191772 )

          The user is presented with a "setup" screen at which he/she can choose "express" or "advanced" setup.
          The screen *clearly* spells out that *if* you choose express settings then DNT will be switched on.

          I'll still say they aren't gathering the user's express consent. It doesn't matter that in the laundry list of items they warn you that 'DNT will be set if you pick express'.

          For it to be express consent, they would actually have to prompt the user specifically to choose to enable DNT or not, AND present

      • Re:Translation (Score:5, Insightful)

        by betterunixthanunix ( 980855 ) on Saturday September 15, 2012 @04:23PM (#41348143)

        Microsoft is planning on destroying the standard/convention by not implementing it properly in IE; e.g. by Default pretending that the user has opted out by supplying a DNT 1 value; instead of the user taking no preference.

        This sounds like the right thing to me. If most users are unaware of how pervasive the tracking is these days, then it should be opt-in. Let people who at least know that there is something to opt in to make a decision about opting in.

        Of course, then the web advertisers would just ignore DNT. Which is what will happen anyway.

        The real answer is not to politely ask these companies to stop tracking us; what reason do they have to care about our wishes? The real answer is to make ABP a standard feature in browsers, with a whitelist option for users who actually want advertising (but which warns them that advertisers will track their browsing habits -- with clear, unambiguous, easy-to-understand wording). We made spam filtering a default for email, and then spam became manageable; we should make ad blocking the default for the web, until it is brought back down to reasonable levels.

        I have no sympathy for web advertisers. They should be excluded from the debate, just like spammers were excluded.

        • by vux984 ( 928602 )

          I installed Windows 8 yesterday on a test system; and the Internet Explorer setup made it very clear that by proceeding with the default settings that DNT would be turned on.

          If we live in a world where clicking "I agree" on a scrollable wall of text that you can't otherwise skip amounts to accepting a contract then deciding to go with the default settings which has all of around 7 bullet points saying what it does ... incluidng turning DNT on, then that absolutely counts as the user making an explicit choic

        • by mysidia ( 191772 )

          You may be conflating advertisers with trackers; not all trackers are advertisers though. Do not track may include things like remembering users' preferences/personalizations when visiting the same site again later, for example: forum comment display preferences.

          This sounds like the right thing to me. If most users are unaware of how pervasive the tracking is these days, then it should be opt-in. Let people who at least know that there is something to opt in to make a decision about opting in.

          Go read

          • by Yoda222 ( 943886 )
            The IE user has made a choice. He has made the choice to use the default settings. Saying that this is not an user choice is like saying that clicking "I read and accept the EULA" does not mean that the user has read and accepted the EULA.
            • by mysidia ( 191772 )

              The IE user has made a choice. He has made the choice to use the default settings.

              The user has not expressed a desire to opt out by using "default settings".

              is like saying that clicking "I read and accept the EULA" does not mean that the user has read and accepted the EULA.

              People click "accept" on EULAs all the time.

              Over 98% of those users who are presented with EULAs, have not read the EULA at all, when clicking the 'has read and accepted' button.

              • by allo ( 1728082 )

                > The user has not expressed a desire to opt out by using "default settings".
                he did.

                Such as he expressed the desire to use the default search engine and some other points, which are in the bullet-point list.

                • by mysidia ( 191772 )

                  Such as he expressed the desire to use the default search engine and some other points, which are in the bullet-point list.

                  There is a fundamental distinction between expressing a preference and accepting a default. Accepting a list of defaults does not express a preference; it's a choice to not express a preference, and just accept what the software developer suggested.

                  • by allo ( 1728082 )

                    no, its the choice to express the preference to use what the list is saying. this is okay with the spec.

          • Until the human being has chosen to opt out, NULL is what the browser is supposed to send

            Did you read what I said? If people do not know how pervasive tracking is, it should be opt-in, period.

            Now with the MSIE change, they will have a valid excuse for ignoring the flag, and the scrutiny, and pressure to respect DNT will definitely end, result: DNT will become worthless, it will become a complete NOOP, everyone will be OPTED back in, per-site "opt out cookie-based schemes (and cookies that expire)" will again be the only way for users to express opt out intent, and the internet will be back in the same situation we were in before DNT had even been proposed.

            There is another, better option, one which the trackers have a harder time defeating: ad blocking. Yes, you can still be tracked if you use ABP, but it is harder when you are not even getting the page elements that are used to track you. DNT is a waste of time and a distraction; advertisers can ignore it if they want, and they can do so without users being alerted to that fact.

            Privacy protection

        • The real answer is not to politely ask these companies to stop tracking us; what reason do they have to care about our wishes? The real answer is to make ABP a standard feature in browsers

          I suspect a better solution is to tighten privacy laws to make extensive tracking illegal.

          I'm a huge fan of ABP but I think it only works while it's a minority use case. If it gains widespread usage it will spark a programming arms race that we are unlikely to win.

          • If it gains widespread usage it will spark a programming arms race that we are unlikely to win.

            We said the same about spam filtering, and yet spam is now down to manageable. I think we can do the same with annoying and intrusive web advertising.

            The real question is not, "Can we win?" but rather, "Will browser makers actually try to win?" Unfortunately, the answer is probably, "No, because browsers are made by advertisers or by people who are in bed with advertisers."

            • Spam filtering works mostly because it is text. Perhaps similar AI could be applied to images but I suspect they look more like noise. Already some pages detect adblocking by using JS to parse the DOM tree to find where the ads should be. A smart blocker could attempt to lie to the JS however it's not hard to imagine this causing page problems if the JS makes layout choices based on it. You'd be trying to keep two copies; one for rendering and one for tricking the JS (that only needs tricking partially,

      • Microsoft isn't destroying the standard/convention. It just sounds like you want uninformed users (the majority) to default to being able to be tracked instead.

        Oh well. Your tough luck. Personally, I don't mind being tracked usually. I'd rather have advertisements come up for buying things I'm actually interested in (sports cars, computers, yachts, computer games) that say, tampons, cramp cures, and weight loss pills.

        Then again, as a webmaster who is often forced to install tracking crap all over the pl

        • by mysidia ( 191772 )

          It just sounds like you want uninformed users (the majority) to default to being able to be tracked instead.

          NO. I want the DNT header to express useful information. The information that the standard says that the DNT header is supposed to express.

          If it is set to 1 by default, then all the DNT header means is you are a typical user who installed MSIE with default settings, you have not specifically indicated an intent not to be tracked, you have just installed software that has falsely claimed that

          • If it is set to 1 by default, then all the DNT header means is you are a typical user who doesn't want to be tracked.

            There, fixed that for you.

            You are so blind that you can't even see the stupidity of your own statements. You believe people should be able to be tracked unless they explicitly say otherwise. While the rest of the world sees the issue as you should not be able to be tracked unless you explicitly say otherwise. It really isn't that hard of a concept, and I feel sorry that you can't understand it.

            • by mysidia ( 191772 )

              You are so blind that you can't even see the stupidity of your own statements. You believe people should be able to be tracked unless they explicitly say otherwise.

              No, but the marketing industry has made a decision that they will track people, until they say otherwise.

              If the browser announces DNT by default, then DNT is not usable as an indication that they have said otherwise, period.

      • Microsoft is planning on destroying the standard/convention by not implementing it properly in IE; e.g. by Default pretending that the user has opted out by supplying a DNT 1 value; instead of the user taking no preference

        That's particularly silly. A well designed standard isn't "destroyed" by using it. The issue is not with Microsoft using the standard, it's with the fact that the "standard" is (I believe intentionally) badly designed; I think it was intended as nothing more than a PR exercise, to give Google and Mozilla the appearance of caring for users' privacy while the contrary will happen in reality. That you buy into this spin and blame Microsoft for Google's faults is quite funny.

        Even funnier is the fact that the so

    • "It is necessary to get behind someone before you can stab them in the back." -- Sir Humphrey.

      If you want to kill DNT, first get behind it, then make sure you get to define what DNT means, how it's implemented and regulated.

    • "But here it is anyways"

  • What's the point if this can be ignored at the server level?
    • The point is that advertisers WILL (and want to) take this seriously on the server level, as long as the user KNOWINGLY sets the DNT option on. But, if it is abused by certain software vendors [technet.com], the whole exercise is going to be rendered pointless.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Advertisers were only going to follow it so long as it wasn't used by many people. As soon as people started using it en mass it would promptly be ignored.

      • by allo ( 1728082 )

        > WILL
        [citation needed]

        • > WILL
          [citation needed]

          microsoft.com honors DNT ... Oh wait, they don't, it's just another way for them to screw with Google. Microsoft tracks you anyway, IE has it on by default in violation of the specification, guess only the people who honor it get screwed.

          • microsoft.com honors DNT ... Oh wait, they don't, it's just another way for them to screw with Google. Microsoft tracks you anyway, IE has it on by default in violation of the specification, guess only the people who honor it get screwed.

            No, it is NOT on by default. The user chooses between express settings and advanced settings. The screen *clearly* states that IF you choose express THEN do-not-track will be set to on.

            By choosing express settings the user has made an informed choice. Or would you argue otherwise in a court?

      • Re:Pointless? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by plover ( 150551 ) * on Saturday September 15, 2012 @03:40PM (#41347943) Homepage Journal

        No, advertisers have no business value in taking this seriously, and every incentive to find ways around it. Advertisers know that targeted advertising is both more effective and less offensive than random advertising. And today, in order to provide targeted advertising, tracking provides an overall picture of an individual's tastes and habits.

        Targeted advertising will continue, but in a different fashion. Instead of tracking you at an individual level, I predict they'll find ways to identify surfers at an aggregate level. Perhaps cookies will contain your advertising preferences instead of your identity. If you visit a few car forums every so often, the advertiser might store the CAR=2 value in your cookie, if you visit Etsy a lot they'll store CRAFT=5, and if you visit a political campaign donation site, they'll store SUCKER=9. Then, as you surf the web, if you're identified as a SUCKER>3, the ads will feature Vote Rombama. They're not tracking you personally or identifying your habits, but they're still targeting you.

        The bigger problem, and why I think Google was the big holdout, is Google Analytics. They don't use the tracking data just for advertising. They sell information about shopping habits to marketers. If you search for "stereo reviews", then click the links to stereo-reviews.com and hifiworld.com, then buy a Coby home stereo for $299 from shopping.com, they can provide that data to stereo retailers around the net: people who buy overpriced crap surf believe the information on stereo-reviews.com and hifiworld.com. Killing tracking kills that intelligence business.

        • No, advertisers have no business value in taking this seriously, and every incentive to find ways around it. Advertisers know that targeted advertising is both more effective and less offensive than random advertising.

          I'm not sure if you know how targeted ads "work". In my experience if I type something into google, click a few links I then get those same pages thrown at me as ads. It makes absolutely no sense as I've already researched that topic and no longer have any interest in it. If I had a product to advertise I would much prefer my brand being exposed to people who didn't already know about it, or hadn't visited my webpage. Google's version of "targeted advertising" is to to hand you a flyer for a store you you j

      • Sorry, I must have missed the part where advertisers have an incentive to honor DNT. Care to explain?
        • If you know you have DNT set, and you see adds that suspiciously appear to be targeting you, then you will be mad about them. If you are mad about the ads you will feel antipathy towards the things being advertised, which is contrary to the purposes of advertising. Granted you have to be aware of the DNT setting and also have cause to suspect the tracking, but attempting to target without looking like you're targeting is probably a losing proposition.

          • . If you are mad about the ads you will feel antipathy towards the things being advertised, which is contrary to the purposes of advertising

            Bullshit. If that was the logic, the advertising-supported web would have failed as a business model over a decade ago. Even before we had ABP and noscript, we had Privoxy, Proximitron, Internet Junkbuster... ads have been pissing people on the internet off for a long time now (and people not on the internet for even longer than that).

            The advertisers' take on the situation you describe is "if they're angry enough to be mad at the product, at least they still remember it. Mission accomplished."

            • Or, you know, not everyone gets all bent out of shape over seeing some ads.

              • Which makes your original claim that it's in their interest to honor DNT even more pointless. The advertisers and their clients are crying about things like ABP et al, even though, if what you claimed was true, they should be all FOR them, since they make sure that only the people who see the ads are the ones who WANT to.

                If that were true, THAT would be "defeating the purpose of advertising."

                • You don't see how people are likely to feel differently about just plain seeing ads and seeing ads they explicitly asked not to see? Advertisers probably don't want there to be any way to block ads because they want to show them, and they probably don't want there to be any way to ask not to be tracked either. But if such a mechanism does exist, then they do have reason to honor it.

            • If that was the logic, the advertising-supported web would have failed as a business model over a decade ago.

              It almost did. Then a company came along with plain text adverts that were based on the content of the page and so relevant to your interests (if you were interested in the page). They were not intrusive, but sometimes they were actually relevant. The company made a huge pile of money based on this idea.

      • This so misses the point. Do not track should be a anonymization option built into the browser where it isn't POSSIBLE to be uniquely identified. In other words all browsers report exactly the same thing.

        Asking to not be tracked is absolutely ridiculous. What is even more ridiculous is people pretending like it will be honored. wink wink.

  • While I like the idea of DNT, it won't be long until folks find a way around it. Remember, Google found a way around the robots.txt file to let their bot continue to index a site despite explicit denial. Of course a lawsuit did end this.
    • Find a way around it? It's an HTTP header. You can ignore it, just like you can ignore robots.txt.
    • "find a way around it"?

      I think you mean "just don't bother implementing support on the server side". By default DNT doesn't do anything at all. DNT only works on sites that take the engineering time to support it on their servers. Google has gone out of their way and spent time and money to support DNT - why would they then search for a way around it? That doesn't make any sense.

    • by mysidia ( 191772 )

      While I like the idea of DNT, it won't be long until folks find a way around it.

      What i'd like to see with DNT is a response header for each HTTP request for GET and HEAD operations, and both requestor and response headers to have _TAGS_ or other identifiers indicating more detailed optouts and more details about the server's policy (E.g. they might declare that they won't track the user, but may retain logs for 24 hours of their HTTP requests), not just relying on the client "blindly" sending a DNT: 1

      • Why are we trusting web servers to be honest? Advertising should be opt-in, not "opt-out, and then only if the server agrees to let you opt-out."

        We didn't bring spam down to manageable levels by politely asking spammers not to send us email. We brought spam down to manageable levels by filtering it so that it did not even reach our inboxes. Why are we treating web advertising any differently?
        • by mysidia ( 191772 )

          Why are we trusting web servers to be honest? Advertising should be opt-in, not "opt-out, and then only if the server agrees to let you opt-out."

          Because we don't have a choice. You are talking about advertising, but i'm talking about tracking. The status Quo is everything is opt-in by default, you can sometimes have to opt-out of tracking and you rarely if ever have any option to opt out of advertising, and the people running the web servers aren't going to agree to anything different; they're going

          • we don't have a choice

            Yes we do: ad blocking software. I would say that ad blocking software is as necessary for web browsing as spam filtering is for email. If website owners are hurting, let them demand impression-based ad revenue, let them serve ads from their own servers, and we can revisit the idea of not blocking ads.

            The status Quo is everything is opt-in by default

            Browser makers can change that. W3C can change that. We can make targeted advertising that is privacy-respecting by using PIR and similar protocols. The fact that we are not doing that shows how much

        • by Miseph ( 979059 )

          "Why are we treating web advertising any differently?

          Probably because we like having "free" content on the web, and "free" content is, generally, paid for by advertising.

          Maybe you're one of those rare birds who likes the idea of paying subscription fees or micro-transactions every time you want to look at a website, but most of us are happier with the occasional unobtrusive banner ad.

          • Maybe you're one of those rare birds who likes the idea of paying subscription fees or micro-transactions every time you want to look at a website, but most of us are happier with the occasional unobtrusive banner ad.

            The 90s called, they want their web advertising back. In today's world, web ads are not unobtrusive, they are not remotely privacy-respecting, and they are bad for web users. That system needs to be stopped, and the sooner, the better.

  • by epine ( 68316 ) on Saturday September 15, 2012 @03:10PM (#41347795)

    We believe that tailoring your web experience â" for example by showing you more relevant, interest-based ads, or making it easy to recommend stuff you like to friends â" is a good thing.

    This is "your" as the anonymous plural. I'm an individual, not an aggregate, thank you very much. I mainly have any friends left at all for not presuming that my tastes are theirs. Strangely, I surround myself with people who have strong minds and distinct tastes. My social circle is not an echo-chamber of group think.

    From [all-caps title suppressed] [edge.org]

    These Big Data issues are important, but there are bigger things afoot. As you move into a society driven by Big Data most of the ways we think about the world change in a rather dramatic way. For instance, Adam Smith and Karl Marx were wrong, or at least had only half the answers. Why? Because they talked about markets and classes, but those are aggregates. They're averages.

    While it may be useful to reason about the averages, social phenomena are really made up of millions of small transactions between individuals. There are patterns in those individual transactions that are not just averages, they're the things that are responsible for the flash crash and the Arab spring. You need to get down into these new patterns, these micro-patterns, because they don't just average out to the classical way of understanding society. We're entering a new era of social physics, where it's the details of all the particlesâ"the you and meâ"that actually determine the outcome.

    Reasoning about markets and classes may get you half of the way there, but it's this new capability of looking at the details, which is only possible through Big Data, that will give us the other 50 percent of the story. We can potentially design companies, organizations, and societies that are more fair, stable and efficient as we get to really understand human physics at this fine-grain scale. This new computational social science offers incredible possibilities.

    I don't mind my search results personalized, but my preference here is to have specific crud removed, not favoured results promoted. Alibaba and scribd and certain content mills would be early casualties, and no link to Elsevier in the top ten, ever. Mostly I can skim a list of 50 search results in the blink of an eye, thank you very much (and I don't find the skim gestalt useless, either).

    Here's the thing, Google, you don't have to guess. Just give me a place to dial in my personal preferences, and then you'll know for certain: I don't want those stinking suggestions. My one burning desire in the user interface for the last decade is more capacity to disaggregate myself from faddish workflows. Ubuntu 10.10, that's how I like it, uh huh uh huh.

    (*) I use a FF extension Make-Link to copy and paste links. Sometimes when you copy an all-caps link it comes out properly, if the all-caps was coded as a presentation style. I used to have an extension decaps to deal with this, but it broke in some FF upgrade. Over my dead body I'm retyping the title by hand to change the case, and neither am I leaving it there to scream at people.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      (*) I use a FF extension Make-Link to copy and paste links. Sometimes when you copy an all-caps link it comes out properly, if the all-caps was coded as a presentation style. I used to have an extension decaps to deal with this, but it broke in some FF upgrade. Over my dead body I'm retyping the title by hand to change the case, and neither am I leaving it there to scream at people.

      Sounds like it's working out to be a real efficiency gain for you.

  • by Dwedit ( 232252 ) on Saturday September 15, 2012 @03:11PM (#41347811) Homepage

    This is basically the "Evil Bit" [wikipedia.org] all over again. It's completely non-binding and ineffective.

    What actually works is using Adblock and Requestpolicy, because that actually prevents third party tracking.

    • by 0123456 ( 636235 )

      This is basically the "Evil Bit" [wikipedia.org] all over again. It's completely non-binding and ineffective.

      While I agree that the solution is to block the sites, your claim is only true for companies that don't claim not to be evil.

      Ad companies who ignore 'do no track' look evil. Google doesn't want to look evil.

      • They may look evil, but hardly anyone cares. Do you really think Facebook will see a mass revolt if it ignores DNT?
    • Network Working Group
      Request for Comments: 3514
      Category: Informational

      The Do Not Track Flag in the IPv4 Header

      Status of this Memo
      This memo provides information for the Internet community. It does
      not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this
      memo is unlimited.

      Copyright Notice
      Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2013). All Rights Reserved

    • Simple question: Why did Chrome's "Do Not Track" feature have to be done in conjunction with the White House and FTC?

      Doesn't that tell you everything you need to know already?

      • I'm confused at this whole story because there is already a Do Not Track extension for Chrome.

    • It's only ineffective if it's not legally enforced. EU has already introduced a law [wikipedia.org] that requires companies to avoid tracking you if you explicitly request to not be tracked. It was not yet successfully argued in court whether DNT constitutes such an explicit request, but it most likely does. At that point any tracking would become illegal.

      The "evil bit" idea is only useless against malicious parties that don't care about compliance with the law, e.g. when they're anonymous. This is not the case here.

  • "There’s been a lot of debate over the last few years about personalization on the web. Our entire business model is based on showing you more relevant, interest-based ads. We also wish to track your specific purchases so we can use your name in ads targeted at your online friends, although that's a bit of a pipe dream since Google+ still isn't getting any traction."

  • belief (Score:4, Informative)

    by Tom ( 822 ) on Saturday September 15, 2012 @05:04PM (#41348371) Homepage Journal

    We believe that tailoring your web experience â" for example by showing you more relevant, interest-based ads, or making it easy to recommend stuff you like to friends â" is a good thing.

    "believe" being the key word there.

    AdBlock all the way. I don't brake for ads anymore.

  • by 19061969 ( 939279 ) on Saturday September 15, 2012 @05:10PM (#41348415)

    Quoth: Google's Susan Wojcicki: 'We believe that tailoring your web experience â" for example by showing you more relevant, interest-based ads, or making it easy to recommend stuff you like to friends â" is a good thing.'"

    Except that I did a *lot* of research (getting a phd for the first few years) that says that tailoring experience misleads people into thinking the stuff around them is more meaningful than it is.

    In some ways, the survivalist approach, while less satisfying, produces much more accurate mental models of information sources.

    I really think that Google had a golden age around 2002 when they had masses of information but little customisation - but let users decide things for themselves.

    Sigh. I'm a fan of DuckDuckGo now and not just because I'm #1 for my important key phrases. DDG doesn't try to 'help' - it just lets you use your brain.

  • You heard it here first:

    Once this standard becomes popular, advertising resellers will stop paying for views/click for hits from browsers with DNT set. Unlike traditional ad blocking, the DNT header signals to the primary site that you are being uncooperative, making it trivial to redirect visitors who set that header to a "fix your browser" page.

    Assuming DNT is actually respected by the server, DNT establishes a second pipeline WRT logging, analytics, error-reporting, and other server-side functions. N

    • If you try to pull that kind of shit anywhere in EU, you'll get their consumer protection agencies descending on you faster than you can say "cookie".

    • by u64 ( 1450711 )

      Does anyone know how to detect DNT headers using PHP ?

  • Or have advertisers use my name and reputation to recommend stuff they'd like others to buy, without my specific consent or any compensation?
  • I like Chrome as a browser but got does it suck for privacy and settings in general. I want my browser to never rememer my browser history clear the cache automatically on exit. Does chrome do this? Possibly but damned if I can find the setting. Privacy is buried under "Advanced settings" and there is nothing that corresponds to clear on exit or don't remember history. Yes I can explicitly clear history but I dont always remember to do this and it's not acceptable I should have to either. Firefox can clear
    • It's admittedly unintuitive, but if you run chrome with the --incognito flag it does what you're looking for.

      • by DrXym ( 126579 )
        I don't want to run incognito. Incognito disables add ons and has other limitations in functionality that I actually want. I just don't want the thing leaving a history of what I am looking at all over the place and would appreciate if it were able to do what other browsers like Firefox and Opera manager. Two settings - one to specify the number of days / urls to remember as history and another to clear on exit.
  • The browser should get an option to resume the interrupted downloads ahead of any other new feature. Firefox was able to do this since version 2.2, if I remember correctly.

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