Google Chrome Introduces Do Not Track 110
sfcrazy writes "Google has started rolling out the latest update to its Chrome browser which brings the 'do not track' option to users. With this move Google has joined major browsers who support this standard. Just like other browsers Google allows users to enable it."
Re:On no (Score:4, Insightful)
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IE is correct to go against industry standards in this case.
Not that it matters, becasue everyone will turn it on and industry will ignore it becasue they have exactly ZERO reason to do what it says.
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No, they're not. This is a protocol, and those only work when you don't have a large portion of participants abusing the protocol. IE still represents a very significant chunk of the browser population, and it's completely irresponsible for breaking the protocol. Industry initially agreed to play by the rules, but obviously if a major player is going to ignore the agreement, industry has no incentive to keep their word.
IF every single person opt-ed in, that is far more significant than everyone just leaving
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The only power that Do Not Track is as a means of making it clear that a user has a particular desire not to be tracked. An advertiser can chose to respect this choice, and will do so if a minority of motivated and technically inclined users make their desire clear - they don't lose out on much information, and they get substantial goodwill for it.
If Do Not Track is the default, it is no different than not having the bit at all - it's just a useless header that has no meaning. If an advertiser has a stanc
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Google would never, ever cut off their product, which is user data and patterns. It doesn't make any business sense at all.
All this can possibly do is turn of targeted ads to give the illusion of not being tracked.
They do not have too. At least not at the browser level. Why do you think Google introduced Google DNS? All Google needs is a DNS record at your IP address on what you do by IP address. This way Google's ad network is covered while competitors are not ;-)
So they can still put DNT and it is good as least you have 1 stalker Google. No one else.
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They do have their own browser.
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Google DNS can only tell the domain, not the specific page you were looking at, so it's much less useful than other kinds of trackers. Yeah, they might know you've been to e.g. Amazon, but they have no idea what products have you looked at.
Considering that the number of people who block tracking is ridiculously low, I think the data from DNS is hardly useful.
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Google would never, ever cut off their product, which is user data and patterns. It doesn't make any business sense at all.
not that simple. consider chrome users that care about being tracked ....
1. google doesn't support "do not track". people that care use some other browser.
2. google supports "do not track". people that care continue to use chrome, and disable tracking.
in this simple scenario, they don't lose anything by supporting do no track. in reality, they gain, because,
a. it's better to have more people tied in to their browser, even if they aren't being tracked
b. many people will reject the browser outright because of
Don't give up your proxy! (Score:1, Interesting)
Cuz "Do Not Track" is a farce.
Just ask Mark Zuckerburg. He's worth billions because FaceBook's technology is designed to slice and dice your online existence.
And what about the gub'ment? You think they're gonna stop monitoring electronic communications just because Chrome gives you a feel-good button to click?
No one cares that you want privacy. Just as Scott "Get Over IT" McNeally.
At least he was honest about it.
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Cuz "Do Not Track" is a farce.
Oh I don't know about that, I have a feeling that DNT works fine, the problem is advertisers not respecting it more than anything as we all know. I have a feeling that the Chromium [chromium.org] will implement something that makes DNT work...properly.
Funny enough, that whole privacy thing? People do. Enough so that various privacy commissioners do get involved like they do here in Canada and Germany, a few other places too. And in most cases they're not toothless either. Maybe that's just an American thing.
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Oh I don't know about that, I have a feeling that DNT works fine, the problem is advertisers not respecting it more than anything as we all know. I have a feeling that the Chromium [chromium.org] will implement something that makes DNT work...properly.
You mean like this? [adblockplus.org]
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You are making VAST ASSUMPTION about what 'Do Not Track' is. Have you read anything about it. Here:
Enabling ‘Do Not Track’ means that a request will be included with your browsing traffic. Any effect depends on whether a website responds to the request, and how the request is interpreted. For example, some websites may respond to this request by showing you ads that aren't based on other websites you've visited. Many websites will still collect and use your browsing data - for example to improve
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Some sites will honor it. I don't see the harm. Especially the sites I use chrome for: All my non pseudonymous stuff like my Gmail account and my credit union. Actually I can't use chrome for some features at my bank because I can't find a way to enable popups for even a whitelisted site. I don't really hope Chrome will change. I would rather my bank change to not require popups. I notice chrome asks me for my gnome keyring password. I am not sure what that is but I believe it's some data stored in m
Google has a pretty piss poor track record (Score:2)
I trust this feature works as advertised as much as I trust them with my data.
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Seriously, I have trouble thinking of any real problems that Google has had with personal data aside from the Google cars collecting WiFi info.
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Problems I've had with Google:
1.) I use PicasaWeb a lot. The URLs have always been obfuscated so that your user name and real name don't show up (it's not my Slashdot user name btw). I did a google search for my real name and found out that Google had indexed my REAL name with my photo albums which showed up under any google search for me. My real name probably comes from using the Google payment service or my email display name. No attempts to alter my Google account name will change my real name as di
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For #4, go to www.google.com/ads/preferences in all of the browsers you use. Remove categories related to finding jobs. If that doesn't work, it probably means you are getting random ads that happen to be about job searches (which would interest a lot of people in this economy).
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I never get spammed from Google, and I have been using there services since their inception. Not a single piece of spam form them, SO I don't really believe your post.
"address book showing up under my YouTube profile pages and I'm sure that eventually they'll start seeing mine."
And? Change the damn setting. Another case of someone who doesn't know how to use something bitching about the systems.
It says this:
" Let people find my channel on YouTube if they have my email address"
I am sure it works as advertised... (Score:2)
but I am sure they have a "work-around" in place, now that they have added this feature.
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The feature works just fine. It adds the extra header information exactly up to spec.
If no one listens to the DNT flag well then that is a whole other issue altogether.
What's the point? (Score:2)
Many reasons for tracking. (Score:4, Interesting)
So it shouldn't be do not track but do not sell my data to data whoring scumbags.
This where the law needs to get with the 21st century. I have a simple suggestion. That any organization or logical part of an organization cannot share your data without your written permission with anyone else on the planet. Thus the billing department for a company can't even share your contact info with the marketing department let alone any third party. Also they need to make obtaining this permission a separate document. They can't have a small section of a larger form forcing you to agree to this. Also agreement to sharing the data cannot be a condition to any other agreement. This way the phone company can't say you don't get an account without sharing data.
The reason for this would be that with the push of a button a company can share millions of records with any dirtbag they feel like. So make it hard work to share data.
I use different addresses (same location but mistakes that don't matter) for nearly every company I deal with so I can see who is selling my data. Nearly all of them are. They might argue that it is for my own benefit but if I don't want it then it isn't for my benefit but to my detriment.
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DNT doesn't mean they won't track you.
Enabling ‘Do Not Track’ means that a request will be included with your browsing traffic. Any effect depends on whether a website responds to the request, and how the request is interpreted. For example, some websites may respond to this request by showing you ads that aren't based on other websites you've visited. Many websites will still collect and use your browsing data - for example to improve security, to provide content, services, ads and recommendati
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If you don't allow people like Google to do their business with your data, then they will most probably stop making all those services free for the user, since the money comes from the user tracking data.
I'm not saying it shouldn't be done. It's sorely needed to regulate the personal information sharing/trading. But people need to be aware that many of the free services we have like so much are free because we are not the clients, our data is the product instead.
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So let the data collecting leeches die a well deserved death. We don't need them
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There's nothing wrong with that. All those free services can go. They'll be replaced by other free services from new companies that will abide by the rules and still think they can make a profit, by doing what their customers want instead of what they don't want. Moreover, if open source has taught us anything, it's that high quality free stuff still gets made by people who just want to be proud to help advance the human race.
So let the data collecting leeches die a well deserved death. We don't need them.
Woww...I really can't believe the mod carnage I'm seeing on this forum. Seems like a lot of 'vested interests' are spamming with their mod points today...
For example, what's 'over-rated' about the quoted comment? Seems to me it's well written, not factually incorrect or profane, and quite reasonable. Oh, riiight, it expresses sentiments that the advertising industry really doesn't want people to think about. In other words, 'over-rated' is mod-code for 'STFU, you're threatening our bloated and obscene p
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They'll be replaced by other free services from new companies that will abide by the rules and still think they can make a profit, by doing what their customers want instead of what they don't want.
Will they? I suppose it's possible, but so far the only effective and scalable free-service business model we've found is advertising. Radio, television, web services... everything is ad-supported. I suppose the companies you're theorizing could use untargeted ads, but that's going to lead us back to what we had in the late 90s -- massive blinking banners everywhere, and lots of them, because that's what had to be done to make them sufficiently effective. I would much rather have discreet, carefully-tar
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I disagree. The analogy of web services with radio and television is inapplicable imho, yet it's also a quite informative juxtaposition.
In the case of TV and radio, scalability is a necessity which ultimately occurs due to the limitations on frequency allocations in the broadcasting spectrum. Auctions fo
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Breaking Google or Amazon up wouldn't eliminate the costs, it would increase them. You can't do the same job with less equipment, in fact you'd need more equipment without the extremely efficient automatic allocation of processing that Google does (it's pretty amazing stuff, actually). I suppose you could envision a world of many small service providers all operating on something like Amazon EC2 or Google Compute or AppEngine, to get the efficiencies of scale without the centralization of control -- but s
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Can't track me if I don't accept your cookies.
Do you load images? (tracking pixels [skillcrush.com])
Do you use flash? ('super' [wsj.com] cookies [howstuffworks.com])
etc.
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And of course the whaling and gnashing of teeth.
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Killer whales have no self respect? :(
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If they had self respect, the wouldn't be falsely called 'Whales'. The would be confident enough to be comfortable with being a specie of Dolphin.
DNT: Now only the bad guys will track you. (Score:5, Insightful)
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There are no good guys when it comes to tracking me.
Re:DNT: Now only the bad guys will track you. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's called "putting them on notice". Sure, they'll still track me. But they can't claim that they didn't know I didn't want to be tracked, or that there was some implicit consent because I didn't tell them I didn't want to be tracked. It's like the fence with the "No Trespassing" sign on it: it won't stop someone from trespassing, but they can't claim they didn't know and thought it was OK. That doesn't matter unless I want to take official or legal action against them, but if I do it's a very useful thing to have available.
Prior art (Score:2)
It's called the evil bit.
And it doesn't work, either. Ignoring the Do Not Track standard won't give you a case against them because:
The Do Not Track standard is why I don't use Chrome: Google believes (and probably rightly so) that its users are idiots. This is designed to give the user a false sense of sec
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I don't have to be doing anything illegal to suffer harm. For instance, if I work for a GOP-supporting business my job may be at risk if they find out I support the Democrats. Note recent news stories of CEOs making fairly explicit threats to employees about what'd happen if they failed to support the GOP in the election (eg. http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/news/175797801.html [jsonline.com]). Just because something's legal doesn't mean I want the public at large, or even any specific third party, to know about it. Take you
They had to (Score:2)
Now you can be relieved! (Score:1)
Now, when selected, no more Facebook or tons of other websites tracking you. Now only Google...
Microsoft Way Of Business (Score:1)
All Your Privacy Belong to Us (Score:1)
Re:do not track or do not serve target ads? (Score:4, Informative)
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The beautiful thing is that it is one more bit that they can use to identify and track you!
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Why is this modded down? It simply doesn't make sense for a company to give something away for free and cut off their product. Google will always extract as much user info as they can from all of their software products. It's their entire business model!
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and they won't waste their time on the small minority that are savvy enough to enable the feature and instead milk the majority for all its worth.
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I think that this is a nod to the idea that BGP is still the foundation of the internet.
If the real world knew how the inet worked and that trust between actual human beings was a factor they would freak out.
So is Google trying to slowly try to tell the populace that BGP is real? I would say yes.
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honestly i hate those targeted ads always trying to sell me something i already bought last week lmao get rid of those and i couldn't care less if they track me or not really
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Do Not Track doe snot stop them form gathering information. Just stops targeted ads. It's useless in any privacy way of thinking.
Enabling ‘Do Not Track’ means that a request will be included with your browsing traffic. Any effect depends on whether a website responds to the request, and how the request is interpreted. For example, some websites may respond to this request by showing you ads that aren't based on other websites you've visited. Many websites will still collect and use your browsing
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If you were serious, you could use one of a million extensions for it. It's not as though updating chrome ever really breaks extensions.
But you weren't being serious. You were just being spiteful by showing your negativity towards a browser you don't have any intention of using.