Yahoo Will Ignore IE 10's "Do Not Track" 360
dsinc writes "And so it begins... Yahoo has made it official: it won't honor the Do Not Track request issued by Internet Explorer 10. Their justification? '[T]he DNT signal from IE10 doesn't express user intent" and "DNT can be easily abused.'" Wonder what percentage of users would rather be tracked by default.
Shocking (Score:5, Insightful)
See now, the trouble here is that all of these privacy settings rely on corporate "good will", when there is no such thing.
Really, the only way to ensure your privacy is extreme paranoia. Sorry.
Re:Shocking (Score:5, Funny)
What's even more shocking is that there's people still using Yahoo.
Re:Shocking (Score:5, Insightful)
No, not at all. The real shock is anyone thinking that Microsoft isn't the one to blame here.
They didn't follow the standard, again, and so they knew the switch in IE would be ignored.
Re:Shocking (Score:5, Interesting)
They followed it just fine. They allow the user to choose the common default configuration and CORRECTLY guessed that most commonly, people don't want to be tracked like an animal.
If the user would like to be tracked, they may choose that as well. It's not like allowing tracking requires a registry hack.
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I'll bet they get something in return for the tracking, like discounts, don't they? I'll further bet that's why they got those cards in the first place. I also suspect that they only present those at the chain they are for and not all over town. They're more like having an Amazon account than they are to the sort of tracking DNT addresses.
Re:Shocking (Score:5, Interesting)
Look at the date stamps on the released versions of the W3C standards - look at the minutes of the meetings of the committee. If you have more than half a brain you will notice that the change between the most recent version and the previous version of the standard - which *did not* have the default clause you seem to think has been there for ever - was not discussed in any meeting.
The WC3 is being influenced by shills. I'd put money on there being some Yahoo! input on the W3C committee.
Re:Shocking (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh Jesus, it's worse than I thought. Head over to
http://www.w3.org/2012/dnt-ws/
Right on the front page - a hiuge great banner:
"""
Workshop Sponsor
sponsored by Yahoo!
Contact W3C if you are interested in Sponsorship
"""
Corrupt as fuck.
Re:Shocking (Score:5, Insightful)
They didn't follow the standard, again
Anyway it's a pointless standard so the argument is moot. A voluntary standard that gets in the way of profits is a standard that will never be followed.
Re:Shocking (Score:4, Interesting)
A voluntary standard that gets in the way of profits is a standard that will never be followed.
Which is why it needs to be made law. In the EU companies now have to ask for permission to use cookies. The result is that when you visit web sites there is a notification bar or similar. It was derided when it came in but actually it has raised awareness of cookies and tracking a great deal, if nothing else.
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There are enough laws. We need a rule that if you want to enact a new law it must repeal five old ones as well as whatever else it is supposed to do.
That is not a good rule, when all bad laws are removed the good ones will follow, eventually we will have anarchy.
In my opinion it would be better if the parliament had to read trough the complete law at the beginning of every year.
If it is too much for someone who gets paid to know the law then you can't expect the population to do it either. If there are too many laws it will be in the parliaments interest to remove the bad or outdated ones and consolidate different laws covering similar situation wheneve
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Let me tell you why that good idea won't work....
The US does have that rule for new legislation. They also have a rule that allows them to dispense with the reading of the law in question if everyone agrees. Every so often a legislator will object to the dispensing of the reading and the reading will continue. They use it as a delaying tactic because the reading blocks any further business f
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Ignorance of the law is no excuse. And yet laws have grown so numerous that no one could know them all, let alone understand them. This has given rise to a clergy of legalists to moderate a citizen's interaction with law: lawyers. And the lawyers invaded government to induce ever more use for their services by creating more complex and inscrutable law. And the lawyers coopted the system of justice such that one almost must be a lawyer to be a judge and interpret the law. And then they coopted the pract
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That law is stupid, though. A browser could easily implement the same by asking you at every new domain it encounters. It would even get rid of 3rd party cookies from ad companies, which the EU law would not stop.
The reason no browser is set up like that is that people don't want to be asked, just like always when it comes to security or technical questions.
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It's a document in its draft form, there are new versions every few months. To pretend that there is one single absolute set of rules or guidelines which may be called "the standard" is naive at best, and disingenuous at worst. In particular, the "defaults" section is changing with every single draft. The most recent (only a matter of weeks back, IIRC) says the default must be 'no user preference set'. The previ
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It is a great standard that would of worked.
For the tiny minority of people who knew enough and cared enough it only makes sense to allow no tracking to make them happy. Particularly since they the users would of found a way not to be tracked no matter what in most cases.
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They do 100% the opposite of what the draft "standard" says...
http://www.w3.org/2011/tracking-protection/drafts/tracking-dnt.html#determining [w3.org]
"A user agent must have a default tracking preference of unset (not enabled) unless a specific tracking preference is implied by the decision to use that agent. For example, use of a general-purpose browser would not imply a tracking preference when invoked normally as "SuperFred", but might imply a preference if invoked as 'SuperDoNotTrack' or 'UltraPrivacyFred'."
IE 1
Re:Shocking (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Shocking (Score:4, Interesting)
Advertisers realised they would be fucked so they changed the standard.
No, advertisers doesn't get fucked with the no-tracking implemented. They will still be able to advertise and will still be able to place targeted ads on web-pages that have a specific theme like ads for computer related products on a gaming related page.
The only thing this does is that they can't have the same advertisements follow me around wherever I go.
I don't like to have Element 14 ads when I browse for porn and I certainly do not like to have porn ads when I browse for electronics.
I am in completely different mindsets when I do the two different things and the targeted ads creates a connection between me being irritated and whatever they are advertising.
The no-tracking might not be what advertisers wants but it is good for them too.
It's the same way with your dog. He might not like the leash since it prevents him from chasing cars, this doesn't mean that chasing cars is good for him.
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If they advertised it heavily as protecting your privacy then that would seem to imply that users choosing it were expressing a preference... At least it would if it were not the default Windows 8 browser.
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I don't think the standard has any business dictating what the default setting is. People can choose their software partly based on whether its defaults correspond to what they want. Here, the standard perversely says that in order to indicate an active user choice, the default has to be the opposite of that.
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I know this isn't the place for facts, but the Windows 8 installer asks the user whether to enable Do Not Track on the first start. The switch is on by default, but it can be turned off then. This happens well before IE10 is even started for the first time. And Windows 8 is currently the only available edition of IE10...
Re:Shocking (Score:4, Informative)
And now Yahoo doesn't either as they can't tell if the user made an active choice in setting the DNT or not. Hell I could set my user agent string, scripts, return data e.t.c. to simulate IE10 and still be tracked with DNT on. Just go to show how utter useless DNT really is without a legal framework.
I don't think anybody really cares whether the do-not-track option is set or not. It sure as hell does not seem to matter to Facebook. The other day I kept being bothered by an nag screen due to an invalid Facebook SSL certificate. Setting the do-not-track check-box in my browser had no effect, it wasn't until I installed a dedicated Facebook blocker that the damn thing went away. If you want anonymous browsing don't rely on do-not-track options, either get yourself some sort of a general purpose anti tracking addon for your browser or download a browser specially designed for anonymous browsing.
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Yahoo still the king of sports coverage (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Huge percentage are IE users (Score:4, Informative)
What's even more shocking is that there's people still using Yahoo.
When working on any neophytes or old persons computer Yahoo is there under IE with the default homepage 80% of the time. Reason being is the crapware that OEMs install as well as ISP software both reset the users homepage too it for $$$ cash back.
Ones with MSN as the default page are typically corporate users. If MS decided not to be retarded and capture the market from Google they would put it in the Windows contract to not change the homepage at the OEM level. ... anyway I can see why Yahoo would be threatened by this as smart users like us who go to sites like slashdot use an alternative browser. Or if we do use IE we change the homepage to Google or something similar. Yahoo is the oldschool portal that regular people use who are not into computers very reminiscent of AOL back in the day 10 years earlier.
Re:Shocking (Score:5, Interesting)
I use flickr and mostly (same reason people stick with 'certain social networks') its because there are some really good people I stay in touch with. its a damned shame that flickr is also yahoo.
I have quite a complex set of adblock filters for yahoo and they often get in the way when I try to do some editing in flickr. some dialogs take nearly a minute to pop up! god knows what jscript evil they are doing, but my systems just hangs and times out until their crap gives up and finally presents me with the dialog box I was trying to get (move photos into a group, etc). their STUPID gui programming interlaces too well with the ads and stuff that catches my filters, the site is nearly unusable. and its totally unusable without any filtering. lose/lose.
its a shame yahoo has mostly died. we do need alternatives. but their mail is unusable on my system and flickr is mostly unusable if you try to do anything other than a simple upload and tag.
hell, even dpreview (used to be a good photo site) has jumped the shark with their new reinvention of their web code. almost nothing works for me, there, now.
what is it with webmasters and the desire to use the most broken coding they can get away with? this really is breaking the web. the web was NOT meant for your javascript 'catch me if you can!' bullshit. it really was not!
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How is this modded Score: 5? No-one uses the Yahoo search engine anymore, but you can bet there are tons of users of Yahoo email, Delicious, Flickr, and so on.
Geeks should know better than to throw out statements just for karma.
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You bring up a good point. I hear about Yahoo! occasionally when it makes the news, like now, but I haven't used their search engine since... forever? Hell, I don't even remember what search engine I used before I switched to Google (and I was late into the Google crowd), it may or may not have been Yahoo!. When I think the company these days, I think of their messenger program and protocol... as a search engine, I don't have too many memories of them, they're mostly forgotten history to me. And as a se
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Yahoo finance is nice, and... euhmmm... nothing really.
Besides, 99% of Yahoo finance hits must come from scraper applications. I doubt that they accept cookies.
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You forgot *.yui.com, and anything else on Yahoo beginning with 'y'. Do a view source to find all their tracking domians. Also add *.flickr.com for their photo entity too.
But that's right, restricted sites zone means no cookies and no scripts allowed. Even if they ignore di not track, restricted sites zone will stop their tracking cold, all they will get is ip address and browser user agent.
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No way you can classify them as chaotic evil. Lawful or neutral evil certainly could have good arguments made for them, but not chaotic...
Re:Shocking (Score:5, Interesting)
proactively tagged and tracked by their ISP and cell phone carrier who sell their information to the highest bidder.
In the civilised world this is illegal and the mobile networks are legally required to provide proper privacy. In fact, employees occasionally go to jail for breaching telecom privacy rules. It does happen in some countries but that is an exception. There are plenty of us who would spend money to have that kind of privacy guarantee extended to internet connections.
Re:Shocking (Score:5, Informative)
Verizon must operate in a non civilised world then. Verizon proactively collects and sells your information unless you log into their portal and turn off the service - providing you can find it. And Verizon isn't the only one - they all do it. Why would any company turn down such as easy way to make money that requires virtually no effort on their part.
Re:Shocking (Score:5, Insightful)
Verizon must operate in a non civilised world then.
Correct.
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Why would any company turn down such as easy way to make money that requires virtually no effort on their part.
"we provide Internet access without monitoring and filtering as is our protected right under EU law."
And that's just one ISP [aaisp.net.uk] of many that have such a policy.
Perhaps you should write to them and ask them which they feel morality usurps profits?
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If you're using HTTPS, the ISP can't track what you're searching, just that you are accessing DDG.
Re:Shocking (Score:4, Insightful)
You're conflating having your physical position logged and having your viewing choices logged. I can't control the former while still using a cellphone, but I can control the latter to some extent by using https forcing and cookie management plugins and a google proxy site like startpage.
Granted it's hardly bulletproof, but it's infinitely better than broadcasting everything in the clear, and having every question that ever pops into my head logged by one corporation.
I'm under no illusion as to how far this setup is from being remotely private. For the tiny amount of effort involved, the modest improvement seems perfectly fine.
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MS broke the standard agreement for do-not-track, so I don't blame anyone for ignoring the setting if from IE10. The standard was there for a reason: It was the only chance any site would agree to following the headers intention.
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MS broke the standard agreement for do-not-track, so I don't blame anyone for ignoring the setting if from IE10. The standard was there for a reason: It was the only chance any site would agree to following the headers intention.
If you stop and think for a minute, this alleged "standard" is nothing more than a promise from the ad companies that they will honor the "do not track" flag as long as we promise to never set it. And you really don't see a problem with that, but blame MS instead? Sheesh, you should be glad MS has called their bluff and exposed the "standard" as the fraud it really is.
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MS broke the standard agreement for do-not-track, so I don't blame anyone for ignoring the setting if from IE10. The standard was there for a reason: It was the only chance any site would agree to following the headers intention.
MS broke the standard agreement for do-not-track, so I don't blame anyone for ignoring the setting if from IE10. The standard was there for a reason: It was the only chance any site would agree to following the headers intention.
The advertising industry never intended to honor Do Not Track [slashdot.org] anyway.
It is the wrong choice that cross site tracking and data aggregation on users should be the default expectation, and this standard is the unholy result of advertising driven companies bending over backwards to try to make a compromise with the big advertisers - that never even intended to honor the choice of users who did manually try to opt out!
I remember the exact same discussion and arguments when pop-up blockers first appeared incl
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Really, the only way to ensure your privacy is extreme paranoia. Sorry.
I would just say "sane" paranoia.
Why not? (Score:5, Informative)
Even Apache doesn't honor DNT if it has been issued by IE10
http://www.pcworld.com/article/262150/apache_web_servers_will_ignore_ie10s_do_not_track_settings.html
Re:Why not? (Score:5, Insightful)
If giving users privacy by default is ignoring the spec then the spec is already meaningless.
As such I and no doubt many others will continue to use ad-blockers and roll out ad-blockers to friends, family, and the businesses we work for to ensure that if they're going to track us regardless of our DNT setting, then they wont get any ad-revenue at all.
So here's the thing, if I go into IE's options and disable DNT, and then re-enable it giving express consent according to the DNT spec then tell me, why is my DNT option still going to be ignored by Apache, Yahoo etc. hmm? Who is breaking the spec to make money and suit themselves then?
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I don't think you need to apologise, let's be honest this spec was created at the behest of the advertising industry to try and keep the industry regulators and national data protection and privacy authorities off of their backs.
The sooner it's exposed as that and they get the authorities onto them regardless and force them to respect people's default will for privacy the better.
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Obviously (Score:5, Interesting)
Is it really a surprise that a failing business like Yahoo! would ignore its users in an attempt to make money?
Look, the obvious lesson here is that no business can be trusted to keep secrets. Also: Water is wet, fire is hot. Don't give out anything you don't want to get out there, no matter what some PHB promises you.
Yahoo Leads the Way (Score:4, Funny)
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Stupid choice from Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
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They should have made a huge startup dialog "Do you want to be tracked"
Have you actually seen the startup dialog [akamai.net]?
It's not that DNT is on by default; as is made clear, choosing the Express settings will turn it on.
The browser out of the box does not have DNT set in either state.
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Thanx for this post!
I thought microsoft had actually enabled it by default, which would be understandable, but against the spec
But here the user actually makes the choice. it's not on by default, but on if the user chooses to use the express settings (and it's clearly indicated)
Or maybe a bit clearer: If clicking "I agree" under a wall of legalese text is acceptable for everyone to agree to the most outrageous demands of the companies. Then choosing express settings with mentioning clearly in a not "wall of
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They should have set the DNT field to a null string when not explicitly selected by the user, telling IE not to respond with a DNT response. When a site asks about DNT, and the value isnt initialized, then it can inform the user something like "$DomainHost has requested information about your willingness to receive targeted advertisement information, and other targeted web services via the DNT function. You can read more about this functionality at $MSDNPageReferenceURL. Would you like to enable this featu
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Actually good on them for exposing what a sham DNT is.
These companies ignoring it are just using whatever excuse under the sun to do what they were always going to do anyway, and ignore it.
As I've said elsewhere, if I disable DNT in IE, then re-enable it, then there's no breach of the spec, and I've provided my express consent for the DNT option, but despite that these companies like Yahoo, and webservers like Apache will still ignore my choice if I use IE10 meaning that it's actually them who are violating
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M$ responds by... (Score:2)
Why assume permission? (Score:2)
The rule on private property is that you do not have permission to use it unless and until the property owner says you do. If he doesn't say anything, you don't have permission.
The rule about inviting yourself into someone else's home is that you don't have the right to unless they say you can. If they don't say, you don't have permission.
Our world's full of things where a lack of explicit permission means you don't have permission. Now, as far as the site itself is concerned I don't object to them tracking
Re:Why assume permission? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why should the rule not be that, absent my express permission for them to track my comings and goings, they do not have permission?
Basically, it should be, this is common sense. The problem now is for those in the advertising industry whose business model has been based on the ability to deceptively trick the majority of users into not realizing just how badly they're being tracked online and how broadly their info is being sold etc.
I think if your business model is based on tricking people into doing something that they would reject if they fully knew and understood what you were doing, then you are doing something wrong.
That said, I think the claims that the industry would just die without the ability to track users are overblown. I think the effectiveness of personalized advertising is exaggerated, as well as the perceived value in compiling detailed user profiles with full web histories. The reason is that targeted advertising doesn't really increase the number of dollars available to chase after goods. Example: you don't really suddenly decide to buy a motorcycle because of a targeted advert ... in most cases you probably decided you wanted a motorcycle first, and then you probably anyway ignored most the adverts in order to do some more solidly grounded market research, e.g. looking at the specs of the bikes, getting some advice from friends or online forums, and looking at what motorcycles actually appeal to you. A targeted ad in that case might make you statistically very slightly more likely to favor another brand .... but for most people the decision will be based mostly on things like advice from friends, comparison of specs, and test rides. And after you buy the motorcycle, those dollars are basically no longer available to spend on all the other crap being advertised online to you.
If targeted advertising based on tracking your data etc. was as useful as has been claimed, Facebook would have made a killing from it, but instead it was a flop, and they have now desperately resorted to just making companies pay for 'sponsored posts' now instead to dump the crap in your feed.
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Why should the rule not be that, absent my express permission for them to track my comings and goings, they do not have permission?
Why should the rule be that the information you explicitly (or unknowingly) divulge through your web browser in the form of cookies, IP addresses, referers, information input into forms, and so on is NOT something you have essentially shared with that party as well as any 3rd-parties they wish to share it with?
As far as I'm concerned, if you hang your tighty whiteys on a clothesline, your neighbors have every right to sell T-shirts with a picture of your skid marked underwear on them. Don't like it? Get a d
I didn't use Yahoo! before... (Score:3)
Makes it easy (Score:4, Funny)
Now I know to do full ad and cookie blocking for yahoo sites.
Thanks Yahoo, you made my decision easier.
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Wait you don't do this by default for the entire internet?
Why rely on this for your privacy? (Score:5, Informative)
DNT+, Ghostery these are all out there. Frankly there's probably very few websites now that don't track your IP address and other details with multiple
trackers.
Hell go to cnn.com and Ghostery blocks 10 trackers alone. Two of those are )(*@!@)*# Facebook trackers. Frankly, the amount of information people are collecting about our web browsing activities is becoming staggering and I for one won't rely on a company saying they'll honor "Do not Track" options from the browsers.
As Navin Johnson said "It's out there, see a doctor get rid of it" - The Jerk
Yahoo has this 100% correct (Score:3, Informative)
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Re:Yahoo has this 100% correct (Score:5, Informative)
The W3C DNT spec explicitly says that a browser should not set this by default, yet Microsoft is completely ignoring the spec and turning it on by default.
No, when you first run IE10, it asks if you would like to turn DNT on as a recommended setting. The user has the choice. Before you say, "Nobody reads that anyway!" keep in mind that the justification for privacy invasion by sites like Yahoo is that they "clear" state it in the fine print (which, in fact, fewer people read).
*I* Rather be tracked by default (Score:5, Interesting)
It makes me feel good inside to know that I am creating revenue for the website that I visit, which helps cover the cost of providing that website. Tracking a user and giving targeting advertising increases the value of the advertising campaigns, which translates into more money for the website.
If we didn't have this, the web is going to become subscription-only very quickly.
Slashdot gives me the option to "Disable Advertising" for having positive Karma, but I choose not to use this.
What is annoying, is that the tracking wouldn't be an issue if the online advertising industry would be more honest to consumers about their practices from be beginning so that it would have been accepted early on, and also not give online advertising a bad name by not tricking websites into displaying ads that the web developer has said not to, and also allowing intrusive or misleading advertising (like how many fake 'Download' buttons do you see on Download sites for example).
Re:*I* Rather be tracked by default (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree with you yet I do have a very strict ad blocker in effect. Why, you ask?
Because I do NOT want to reward pages that trick me into visiting them by allowing them to spam ads at me. Rather, I would prefer to damage them by increasing their bandwidth without getting them any ad revenue in turn. If enough people did it, such pages that hook onto common search queries without actually providing the relevant information would quickly cease to exist.
If, and only if, a page offers me what I want, be it information, entertainment or just a joke, I go out of my way to enable their ads if, and only if, they don't slap me in the face with popups and more windows opening than the average person can close in a lifetime. If the ads are actually on topic (like Slashdot's are more often than not, interestingly) I will even click them to see what's on the other end of it.
Ads are not bad by definition. Ads can actually be very informative, I would have never discovered a few games and other goodies I treasure if it was not for ads. They received their bad name by ad companies that thought it's a bright idea to make them annoying. Annoying ads don't work in the online world where I, not the ad company, decide what I'll get to see. Make ads informative and you'll see people will not only stop blocking them, they'll actually follow the link they provide to learn more about the product.
Of course, for that to work you'd first of all need a product that people actually wanted and that doesn't need hard selling...
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Make ads informative and you'll see people will not only stop blocking them, they'll actually follow the link they provide to learn more about the product.
One very interesting example of this is Google's shift to "skippable" ads on YouTube. I'm sure we'd all rather not have video ads at all, but I've noticed that when advertisers realize they only have a few seconds to hook you before you click the "skip" button, they come up with some pretty entertaining ads. More often than not I don't click "skip".
Re:*I* Rather be tracked by default (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, because before ads and subscription only became the norm there was nothing on the internet whatsoever, no content at all, nope, none whatsoever. Even sites like Wikipedia don't actually exist and we all just imagined them because they don't have ads or tracking so they can't possibly be real.
For what it's worth the quality of content has gone down with the increase in ad-revenue run sites. You only have to look at Slashdot for example - nowadays due to being so reliant on gathering ad-revenue they regularly post stories that are out and out flamebait and not correct, informative, or interesting whatsoever purely to gain ad-revenue. Ad run websites have merely created a race to the bottom- to provide as much untrue inciteful bollocks as possible to make people come and see what the fuss is all about to increase ad revenue.
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I never bothered with an ad blocker for years.
It was just one single product that made me change my mind. A single product that kept on putting up intrusive ads - ads with no obvious way to close them, ads which were overlaid across the page I wanted to read, ads which quite obviously used Javascript that hadn't been tested on Safari under OS X because they broke horribly.
(I particularly draw your attention to that last bit. The product in question was MacKeeper).
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It makes me feel good inside to know that I am creating revenue for the website that I visit, which helps cover the cost of providing that website. Tracking a user and giving targeting advertising increases the value of the advertising campaigns, which translates into more money for the website.
If we didn't have this, the web is going to become subscription-only very quickly.
Where your argument falls apart is that displaying advertisements and tracking users are mostly orthogonal problems. The print business has been doing OK without tracking users in magazines, and so does the TV business. They *do* track users, mind you, but they do so by doing surveys in which users *volunteer* information. They can then display targeted ads according to the three most relevant means of segmenting a market: sex, age and revenue.
Web advertisers, by contrast, decided it was a good thing to tra
Dear industry (Score:2)
If you want us to stop using tracking and ad blockers, you might want to put pressure on companies (like, say, Yahoo) that make us use them.
Sincerely, your user.
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(assumes role of Devil's Advocate...)
Dear User,
The reason we want you to stop using software to block advertisements and tracking cookies is manifold; we rely on advertisement revenue to supply you with our web content. In addition to that, we rely on tracking cookies to track your browser session. We do this to differentiate your session from other registered users, and to maintain the contents of any internet shopping queues you may have currently active. Obstruction the function of these two required ser
I don't use IE (Score:2)
Does Yahoo honour the Do Not Track of any browser?
If so, which?
Microsoft has won (Score:3)
They are now showing the world, what it is like to use a setting, where the obedience of the websites is voluntary. And they have their cross-site-tracking detection feature.
written from firefox with DNT on, noscript and adblockplus with no-tracking blacklist (no ghostery, as its rather dubious and ABP can do the same with the right lists)
Percentage of users who don't want to be tracked (Score:4, Informative)
Wonder what percentage of users would rather be tracked by default.
According to a 2012 Pew Internet study [pewinternet.org], 73% [pewinternet.org] of search engine users said they were against tracking by the search engines, and 68% [pewinternet.org] were against targeted advertising.
The corollary is that respecting DNT even for IE 10 matches what over 70%(*) of the users want, while ignoring it only satisfies the wishes of 28%(**) of the users.
(*) I'm starting with the 'targeted ads' numbers which are the more conservative ones. The survey shows 28% of the users want them and 68% oppose them. Furthermore another study [softpedia.com] shows that, when they have to manually hunt and set DNT, 5 to 6% of the overall population turns it on. Given that we know 68% favor DNT that means 7 to 9% of the users will go through the hassle. So if DNT is on by default on IE 10 we can expect 7 to 9% of the I-want-targeted-ads crowd to turn it back off which translates to 2 to 2.5%. So if DNT is honored for IE 10 these 2 to 2.5% users will get what they want as well as the 68% who are fine with the default setting, yielding a total of 70 to 70.5% users getting what they want.
(**) Or, conversely, going against the wishes of 68% of the users (the remaining 4% don't know what they want).
Strawman (Score:3)
It's not Yahoo that's at fault here, at least not all by itself. Microsoft chose to implement an "on by default" DNT feature in IE10, which goes against the agreed intention of DNT. Microsoft can fix this in many ways, the simplest of which could be to offer the user a choice upon first using IE10 - heck, they can even have the "activate Do Not Track" option selected by default, so people will only have to click "OK".
Why, do you think, did Microsoft choose not to do this? Do you really think that removing that choice from the first use degrades the user experience so much that it validates ignoring a standard and risking justified behavior from parties like Yahoo? Or could it be that it is Microsoft that would like to see DNT marginalized and sees this as the perfect way of doing so: embrace (done), extend (done), extinguish (in 3.. 2.. 1...)
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"Slow" being the operative word, if Yahoo is anything like AOL. AOL is still around, somehow, though I have no fucking clue how. I'm guessing it'll be able to hang on and generate revenue until its users all die of old age (which probably won't be that long).
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But Yahoo isn't anything like AOL in terms of survivability. Yahoo made an insanely good investment in Alibaba so now they can pretty much coast on those profits through years of horrible web apps and intrusive advertising...
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Selling almost $8B in Alibaba stock isn't an assertion, it's a fact. Look it up. It may end up being the main reason Yahoo is around in 5 years.
Sort of like how Tivo is only around because they have sued Dish Network, Verizon, etc for hundreds of millions, not because they are actually making a profit from their service any more...
Re:And users will continue (Score:4, Funny)
AOL is still around, somehow, though I have no fucking clue how.
Lies! I haven't received any free coasters from them for years now.
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Lies! I haven't received any free coasters from them for years now.
That's how they saved the company!
You wouldn't believe how much they were spending to press & mail out those CDs.
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What browser makers really need to do to prevent tracking is to simply clear cookies when you close your browser. For good measure also clear flash and silverlight cookies. That prevents persistent tracking. It works perfectly for me. I've never needed do not track.
How do you know they aren't tracking you by IP address and habit of sites you visit?
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Panopticlick : identifying information leaks out (Score:2)
- the details and specificity of your browser of choice as indicated by your browser agent,
- your browser settings,
- your screen real estate in pixels,
- your system fonts,
- your browser plug-ins,
- and the content of your HTTP_ACCEPT headers,
- your time-zone,
- and your javascript-abilities. My browser as set gives out 18.43 bits of identifying information
Re:Microsoft should... (Score:4, Insightful)
Is anyone else bothered by the fact that MICROSOFT gives more of a shit about the end user than everyone else?
All that Microsoft did achieve...and all it could achieve is to have others ignore the functionality. They actually destroyed its functionality by embracing it. If Microsoft gave a shit it would be using Tor, or creating similar technology...or even just making their own OS less spyware. I was shocked at how much information Windows 8 wanted from me.
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Not really, actually, it's logical. For MS, we're the customer. For Yahoo, we're the product.
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Actually, for MS, Dell is the customer. Except for their advertising department (aka Bing) where you are the product.
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If I just could opt out of that delusion of safety. In return, I promise I won't complain if the boogeyman du jour (is it still terrorists? I lost interest a while ago) kills me.
Agreed? No? Gee, why not?
Leading Questions (Score:2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA [youtube.com]
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