Think Tank's Website Rejects Browser Do-Not-Track Requests 362
alphadogg writes "The website for the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) now tells visitors it will not honor their browsers' do-not-track requests as a form of protest against the technology pushed by privacy groups and parts of the U.S. government. The tech-focused think tank on Friday implemented a new website feature that detects whether visitors have do-not-track features enabled in their browsers and tells them their request has been denied. 'Do Not Track is a detrimental policy that undermines the economic foundation of the Internet,' Daniel Castro, senior analyst at the ITIF wrote in a blog post. 'Advertising revenue supports most of the free content, services, and apps available on the Internet.'"
Return bogus data (Score:2, Interesting)
Can't the browser just give bogus data on request?
Re:Aha! (Score:4, Interesting)
Not a bad example, though. All they do is approving the submissions of some other people that don't get a single dollar from what they send to the site.
So they make money of other people's work. True or false?
Re:Foundation of the internet? (Score:5, Interesting)
Absolutely. I would argue against any attempt to prevent someone from running AdBlock Plus or the like — filtering what you allow onto your computer (whether filtering what you ask for from someone else or, less usefully, asking for it and then not displaying it) is absolutely your prerogative too.
DNT is a slightly challenging use case, to my mind. As I understand it, it means that I request everything on a page, but also send an additional request that some things do not happen with my data. I'm not actually filtering anything, or not requesting certain parts of the page — I'm relying, even trusting, the content owner to behave in accordance with my wishes. Which is partly why I'm not giving up ABP any time soon, just as a promise from everyone on the Internet not to do something I don't want them to do in terms of accessing my server would not lead me to dropping my firewall.
Re:Foundation of the internet? (Score:3, Interesting)
Bull.. Everything, including(especially) Slashdot is is much faster when their ad servers are blocked. It's actually very dramatic. Sorry Slashdot, you gotta fix that if you want me to see your ads.
Re:Advertizing and privacy are 2 different things (Score:2, Interesting)
"Ironic" is people installing Ghostery thinking they are sticking it to the web trackers and not realizing that Evidon (Ghostery's owner) is tracking them through Ghostery for the purpose of selling reports to advertisers on where their ads are displayed.
Re:That's fine (Score:1, Interesting)
Or you can just cut them all (ads, malware, spyware) off at the ankles and install a HOSTS file like the one at http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm [mvps.org].
Re:Well damn (Score:4, Interesting)
Well I'm one of those mommy bloggers you so vehemently bitched about. The big thing is, I don't have the Discretionary funds to pay a host for my effin blog and that's why in hell I juse Live Journal. Decent trade-off to me. I get their free package, they gain a little more ad-revenue to cover my hosting costs
In regards to Blogger and some of the other obnoxious sites. Hell yes, I actually agree with you that they need to die and it's why I refuse to visit most if not all blogs hosted by them leaches. Yes LJ does have ads but their simple enough to be unobtrusive to me and I don't block their ads in ghostery. I Do continue blocking flash/silverlight and god damn iframes with noscript though for general security reasons.
Re:A way to "automagically" update hosts (Score:2, Interesting)
I get exactly the same effect with my Hosts file and for those that don't understand how they work, it's pretty god damn simple. I never make the connection to the god damn server - no ad/malware or other crap to see. As to updating the damn thing every week? I don't do that. That's why I also use Noscript and I look at what scripts are being blocked. If any ads make it through, I'll cut and paste into my plain text editor the obnoxious site. Works quite well for me. Yes I do see the random ad but now that my hosts file is configured, I rarely see them as I'm not surfing all over the net anymore and into the god damn underbelly.
Re:Well damn (Score:5, Interesting)
"Remember adblock users, disable adblock on web sites that rely on ad revenue to operate, and aren't greedy commercial goblins!"
I don't use AdBlock. I use NoScript and Flashblock, disable 3rd party cookies, and have my browser and global Flash preferences both set to "Never Allow Local Storage".
That way, ads from sites that AREN'T tracking me show up just fine.
Re:Well damn (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Well damn (Score:4, Interesting)
In the beginning, sure. But do you remember the original Google ads? They were plain text, unobtrusive, and were linked to the content of the page. If you were reading a review of laptops, then they'd have adverts for the laptops being reviewed, for example. They didn't need to track you, because by reading a page about X they knew that you were interested in X. This is exactly how print adverts (you know, the ones that still make large amount of money) work.
In my personal experience, ads got a lot worse once they started trying to tailor them to me, rather than to what I was reading. I actually clicked on quite a few Google ads - especially on Slashdot - when they were fairly generic site-relevant things. Now they are really good at showing me ads for things I've just bought and therefore have no further interest in purchasing.