Good, it’s about time the lie of Do Not Track was put to bed. It gives people a false sense of control over their data and privacy - the intention was good but if it’s not enforced then it makes people think they’ve done something to protect their privacy when they have done nothing.
plus it was another data point for profiling people based on their browser settings.
It was also possible to be used as part of a fingerprint.
Its removal is as useful in preventing fingerprinting as its presence was in protecting privacy.
This is sad and yet another step backwards for Firefox. Yes, not many websites honored it, but some did and automatically set cookie preferences accordingly. There should’ve been more lobbying for this to become legally binding within the EU instead.
It was a double-edged sword. While websites could honor it, it could also be abused as another data point for fingerprinting.
Even more reason to make it legally binding.
How are you going to prove that this particular metric was used to fingerprint? That’s the issue I have - you can identify cookies, pixel trackers etc but there’s no way to prove whether a site uses a flag you send anyways. And enforcing something that can’t be proven is really hard - currently, not only the easy rules are enforced.
If it was law to abide to the Do Not Track setting, then a leak about a company dishonoring this would simply face massive fines, which is usually enough encouragement for them to abide.
So they just set up hosting for the site or service in a locale that doesn’t have those laws.
Now what?
That does not matter. If you operate within the EU then you have to abide to EU law.
It did basically nothing and just made you easier to identify and gave false sense of privacy. Good riddance imo
It was like wearing a technicolor badge with flashers that said “don’t look at me” while playing the sound from Inception.
It made you more trackable because the entire ad industry ignored it. While there were a true, TRUE handful of sites that respected it, those are never the sites usually it was meant to deal with.
Presumably it’s easier to lobby for something that’s already legally enforced elsewhere. And sometimes lobbying is just unsuccessful.
With a reasonable alternative available, removing the additional fingerprinting vector seems like the best idea to avoid tracking. The few good actors can look at the Global Privacy Control instead, so there’s literally no downside here.
How’s that different?
GPC? It’s different because there’s already a jurisdiction that legally enforces it.
Yeah, and I’ve been seeing more lately…
At least the forks will probably keep it…
How about the rare sites that respected it 🤔
If you respect it odds are that you aren’t part of the problem to begin with.
why would small sites track you to begin with?
Talking about odysee,broadcomm,at&t,etc
so not small at all. i see you corrected the post too.
the main response to that is: how do you know they respect it?
Odysee it says in their privacy policy when they detect do not track is on they wont track you,At&t and boradcomm they have a system that sees the signal and declines tracking automatically
that doesn’t mean anything, since it’s all server side there’s no way to verify. that’s the problem with the dnt header. all it is is an extra data point.
also, fwiw i would not trust a service like odysee to abide by it’s own policy at all, considering its history.
ohh okay.
If you wish to ask websites to respect your privacy, you can use the “Tell websites not to sell or share my data” setting. This option is built on top of the Global Privacy Control (GPC). GPC is respected by increasing numbers of sites and enforced with legislation in some regions. To learn more about this, please read Global Privacy Control.
So those sites can look at that.
Ohh it’s forced by law in some countries, sounds better ngl.
DNT is going to give a false sense of security.
- like leaving your shop door open when you go out for lunch and posting a sign saying ‘Don’t come in here and steal’.
It only works for websites who respect it, but leads users to think they’re somehow ‘protected’.
Privacy focussed engineers add DNT feature to browsers…
Marketeer assholes: hey, another tracking data point!
In fact, sadly, DNT can be used to track user because only few users enable it.
