The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), privacy company Disconnect and a coalition of Internet companies have announced a stronger "Do Not Track" (DNT) setting for Web browsing—a new policy standard that, coupled with privacy software, will better protect users from sites that try to secretly follow and record their Internet activity, and incentivize advertisers and data collection companies to respect a user's choice not to be tracked online.
The new DNT standard is not an ad- or tracker-blocker, but it works in tandem with these technologies.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @08:18PM
get this: advertisers and other baddies will gleefully report that they're respecting your DNT header and then promptly add the presence of that header to your fingerprint, just as Runaway1956 indicated.
The EFF says you are wrong. From the linked article:
Enforcement
Companies supporting DNT do so voluntarily, but existing law generally requires companies to honor such voluntary commitments. Under such laws, a company that doesn’t do what it says it will do may be engaging in an unfair, deceptive or misleading trade practice. Consumer protection entities like the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general can take action against such deceptive practices.
The difference between this system and the previous DNT implementation is that website compliance was passive and so failure to respect the DNT flag carried no penalty because the website could simply say nothing and then "gleefully" do whatever they wanted. Now they must actively lie, which puts them on the hook for fraud. Any company big enough to be a privacy danger is going to have their legal team screaming at them not to lie.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @08:39PM
And they will never get in trouble for lying, just as copyright thugs never get in trouble for misusing the unconstitutional garbage known as the DMCA.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @09:15PM
> And they will never get in trouble for lying,
Because the FTC never enforces [ftc.gov] privacy [pcworld.com] regulations. [cnn.com] Never [forbes.com] ever [ftc.gov] happens. [techtimes.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @02:44AM
(Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday August 04 2015, @11:03PM
Ah, apparently I skimmed too quickly! I stand corrected.