Sign in / up

back to article Do Not Track W3C murder plot fails by handful of votes

The privacy-enhancing Do Not Track standard is wobbling badly after barely surviving a no-confidence vote by the W3C consortium. Held among World Wide Web Committee (W3C) working group members, the vote against drafting a Do-Not-Track (DNT) standard was narrowly defeated by a majority of just five. W3C members working on the …

COMMENTS

House rules Send corrections
This topic is closed for new posts.

Page:

  1. dan1980

    The 'price' keeps increasing.

    What gets me is not that the ad companies are against this - of course they are. It's that when talking about tracking and privacy, they deliberately ignore the elephant, which is that most users don't want to be tracked.

    They talk about "richer experiences" and more "relevant content" and generally carry on as if they are doing all this for the users and that they should be happy about it.

    I understand that advertising supports many of the websites we all love (including el Reg) but things aren't free; we 'pay' by looking at ads - that's the deal. The point is that, like any deal, we all want fair value and with the ever-increasing tracking that is going on, the 'price' of visiting websites is increasing.

    Unfortunately, monopolies mean we all end up paying more for stuff and Google's monopoly in online advertising is no different - we are being asked to give them ever more information in exchange for content. It's fast turning into a very bad deal indeed but unfortunately we don't really have much choice and that is why such tracking and collating of our personal lives will continue largely unabated.

    On an unrelated note, I recently decided to spruce up my foil hat with some nice pictures of rain clouds and half-empty glasses.

    3 0
  2. PyLETS
    Big Brother

    DNT obsolete

    If a site wants to make a polite request clickable by the user they can ask and may even try to cultivate the kind of good reputation where users will believe this preference will be respected. Given most web browsers are unlikely to be configured by their users, what the DNT on the client says is likely to be only marginally related to the behaviour the user actually wants. Better for users who know what they want to control how the browser stores cookies and other history, and then there's no opt out for an advertiser who prefers to ignore a configured browser preference.

    1 0
    1. Charles 9
      Reply Icon

      Re: DNT obsolete

      Unless there is a way for a browser to track whether or not ad sites are honoring DNT or not. Doubt it could be logistically pulled off (since the ads can pretty much become indistinguishable from actual pages), but a framework like that would be needed to make DNT enforceable since sites ignoring DNT could be labeled untrustworthy and blocked by default.

      0 0
  3. Mike Moyle

    Maybe we can come to a compromise...

    We'll allow you to track users.

    You're just not allowed to PROFIT from that tracking; you can't sell, rent, or give away the data and you can't use it to push advertisements. And you are required to keep that data safe from any third party that might want to use it in any ways that are disallowed by the rule or illegal.

    There. Everybody gets what they're asking for. Problem solved.

    1 0
  4. WeeJB

    Is it not the case that whatever legislation is passed, the advertisers will find a way to circumvent it as they did with app permissions.

    0 0

Page:

This topic is closed for new posts.