Mozilla plans 'Do Not Track' bottle-stopper for private surfers

Oh, seriously?

"Please, mister advertiser! *Please* don't give me that bad old tracking cookie!"

So, seriously, why does anyone bother with a lead balloon like this? Is it just so Mozilla Co. can say "Look, we pretend to care about your privacy more than Microsoft pretends to!"

Like this will work

Until governments force the web sites to honor the requests from browsers not to track users, I don't see many volunteers. Even then I think a few sites will have to be made examples of to show them they mean business before they fall in line.

Google Chrome

http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2011/01/keep-your-opt-outs.html

Already available

For anyone who wants to get ahead of the curve on the whole tracking issue, the latest NoScript and Adblock Plus add-ons already provide this feature.

http://hackademix.net/2010/12/28/x-do-not-track-support-in-noscript/

There was a problem retrieving the site

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Feck 'em

My cookies bite the dust unless I trust the site, and I trust very few sites. I give El Reg elbow room, but then I like to live on the edge. Yeah! Go me!

random cookery

I've never understood why no one has been arsed to write a random cookie stuffer.

Everytime they ask for their cookie give them some total pile of tripe. They've probably never coded for it and so their site will find all sorts of interesting features. If enough people did it then they'd soon stop.

Worth saying again

You can have all the functionality of Google without the ads and tracking by using Scroogle instead. You can even have your searches and results encrypted to and fro. Start at http://www.scroogle.org

No one knows what "Do Not Track" means...

Deleting cookies does not protect you from people like Google. Log on systems commonly use cookies because it's a simple (relatively efficient) method to maintain sessions over multiple http requests, but there are currently other methods to track people's browsers that don't require such clean methods or have user controls. Cookies are one way to track people. Other http headers, information embedded in urls, new javascript APIs, browser fingerprinting, flash storage, other plugins, and any method combined with ip address information are all ways to track users without cookies or to at least restore cookies. Advertisers, including Google, use combinations of profiling techniques to make sure there customers(?) don't accidentally miss out on anything in case someone else hacks into their computer and deletes their cookies. Chances are advertisers can hire people to find new exploits, too, whenever new plugins or javascript APIs are developed.

There needs to be more rules to protect people's privacy from corporations with more power to exploit technology than the average person has to protect themselves from new threats. People are misled concerning cookies. They've been misled about things like Do Not Track and net neutrality. And they've even been misled about the benefits of targeted advertising. Obviously Do Not Track is not enough, but it would provide for a standard for opting out that would be the same for all clients (browsers) and servers (advertisers). If there is going to be a standard for opting out, there should be a standard for what opting out means and how it will be enforced, too.

Relying on self regulation won't work for this reason, but if users and law makers were better informed, a Do Not Track system that was effectively backed up by law could work without requiring a third party to maintain lists, servers, or other systems. (Although it would make more sense to to give consumers privacy rights against unethical business practices and all forms of tracking embedded in technology.)

Until laws are passed to back up Do Not Track headers sent by browsers, all the Do Not Track plugins endorsed by browsers are simply deceptive marketing techniques and all unofficial ones are simply a proof of concept.

Just get a *really* good hosts file

I use the one that is published and updated regularly at http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ - it speeds up my browsing, saves monthly download allowance and I've hardly seen an ad or tracking cookie since I started using it.

Advertiser Tracking -- Not That Bad!

People really need to stop this Knee jerk reaction that "advertisers tracking" is bad.

Online ad providers do not track the private data of the user, instead Online ad providers track their OWN data and that of the merchant.

In fact, you get more privacy than you do with you banks tracking, that tracks not only only all your exoctic purchases, but knows exactly who you are and the very location the purchase was made!

When you get cookied by an ad provider - they dont store "John Smith, Male, 32, Single/Married/Other" instead they store a code chain that tells them "The operator of this browser click on [advertisers link] on website [X] on date of [x]"

Later on the advertisers site, that cookie is "read" and sales data reported to the ad provider by the merchant why........ so the provider can pay commission to the referring website of that user.

Again at no point is it possible to determine the "Person" that bought any product, only the origin before the users came through.

Want to see how much ad providers help the "common user" ? Well Google loyalty sites! Loyalty sites use ad providers to track their users across hundreds of merchants....... but they pay the USER the commission that they make off those adverts.... sometimes up to a hundred pound sterling for something like a mobile phone contract.

I prefer not to trust others to protect me if I can do the job myself.

As some of the folks who run websites say, unless they can collect someone's data (or have another source of revenue), they can't stay in business. I'd like my 'net services to remain free, so unfortunately, those who don't know any better must suffer.

I prefer not to trust others to protect me if I can do the job myself.

There are plenty of tools available which will help preserve your privacy on the 'Net. When I want to surf anonymously, I surf using a Linux "live CD". There's no personally-identifiable data on the system, so I don't even have to trust Mozilla. (The hard disk on my laptop is encrypted to protect the data if it's stolen, so even if the live CD tried to be helpful, it can't mount any filesystems from the hard disk.) When I'm through surfing, I reboot and ALL information related to that session vanishes. Of course this prevents bookmarking sites, but security and convenience are often at odds.

If I were a little more paranoid, I'd put The Onion Router (TOR) on my firewall then create a (very slightly) customized live CD which used my TOR installation as a proxy server. (Using TOR would prevent the target website from seeing my IP address, and prevent my ISP from seeing the website's address or any data I exchange with the website.)

If you wanted it to be more convenient, you could probably copy the live CD to hard disk, then run a copy as a virtual machine. You'd just have to remember to delete the virtual machine after each session.