1/ “Do Not Track” the Privacy Tool Used by Millions of People, Doesn’t Do Anything https://gizmodo.com/do-not-track-the-privacy-tool-used-by-millions-of-peop-1828868324 … via @gizmodo’s @kashhill // This is a good summary of the history of do not track. BUT I think it is too nice.

2/ Early in the development of browsers, it’s fair to say that every feature that was developed to permit people to have control over what they are shown/see was met with massive resistance from “advertising” write large.

3/ Popup blockers. It was incredibly annoying to browse the early web. You’d open a page and more windows would open. You’d close a window and more windows would pop up.



AND as soon as popup blocking was added there were cries of “this is the end of the ‘free’ Internet”.

4/ Among ironies, it was toolbars through brought blocking. One risk traded for another.



But somehow we powered through this and it became acceptable as an industry to block pop ups.



Sort of, of course now we see these as flyovers with tiny close boxes.

5/ Cookies. Like everything, cookies started off solving one problem and then w/ technology advertisers saw an opportunity to use them more.



One of the biggest solutions to this was InCognito/Privacy mode.

5/ When we added this to internet explorer we were immediately met with calls to add an API to “alert” a site that privacy was being used.



Advertising world came at us hard saying, you guessed it, this was the end of the free internet.



Big fear was always browsing in private.

6/ Along the way InPrivate/InCognito became known as “porn mode” and almost a negative. Maybe funny, but this just gave “ammo” to the ad industry—“we are not about breaking the law and ‘pornography’” conflating privacy and porn.

7/ FB Beacon. A famous story in tracking where you were followed around the internet by a tiny transparent image. This was a huge fiasco as you can read about. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Beacon …



But of course much of the badness of this was scale, when in fact many others were doing this.

8/ The result of this lawsuit and reaction was actually pretty minimal and for the most part focused on facebook and the GIF implementation.



The real problem with tracking are the third party ad networks.

9/ Third party networks. Every time you visit a site that site pulls information from many other locations. This is by design and literally the cool thing about the “web”.



Early on this was just to do things like pull images from one subdomain and so on.

10/ With rise of ad networks, ads served from another domain (not just subdomain). When visiting a URL by typing in address bar http://foo.com you actually visit dozens of TLDs.



These domains can leave cookies and “track” you. This is the origin of do not track—DNT.

11/ IE originally designed DNT to essentially warn users that a site was pulling information from all over the place. The design was based on using top-level-domains. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703296604576005542201534546 …

12/ Our “demo” of do not track relied on yet another previous attempt at privacy, the now legacy “web page privacy policy” dialog based on P3P standard. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P



We’d browse to a reporters site and show the WPPP dialog and 💥 look at all those sites you “visited”.

13/ We would then go to the official privacy policy for that publication where there was always some hardcore statement about “we do not track” followed by “also, from time to time visiting our site means you are visiting third party sites, so please see their privacy policy”.

14/ There was literally no accountability and a vast capability to track (also spread malware through these ads no one ever verified).



Prior to and after this announcement we spent massive amount of time with advertising community as represented by lobbyist organization in DC.

15/ Of course the challenge for us was that other parts of Microsoft were members of those organizations.



So not only were the lobbyists telling us we would end the free internet and shut off the first amendment, so were some other parts of the company.

16/ I suspect nearly every large company that champions privacy also finds itself at the other end of this debate—benefitting directly or indirectly from advertising.



That’s how you end up with a non-feature. Today’s DNT is a vestige as the article describes.

17/ Gradually feature was eroded. Ultimately the “battle” was lost to lawyers and lobbyists and feature was turned off, and even when turning it on it was sort of unpleasant.



The big “ask” was “tell a site DNT is on”. Obviously we knew sites would silently block on a “DNT:on”.

18/ Today we see that almost all the third party blockers do much more than what was envisioned a few years ago.



And we also see sites that block you if you’re running those.

19/ For me, the right answer to all of this is just accountability.



When one visits a site one should be certain that the site’s privacy approach is consistent and applies to all the content fetched by the browser AND the top level domain is responsible for that.

20/ But too many sites rely on multiple third party ad networks which benefit from tracking, profiling, or otherwise aggregating across their own customer base (made up of varying privacy policies).

21/ There’s a lot more to this. I did not dive into many details and subtleties.



I am in no way opposed to web advertising, even in volumes.



I am not in favor of being tracked without knowing it, being served malware, and lack of accountability. // END

You can follow @stevesi.

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