How's Mozilla Doing with Do Not Track? Not So Good

The DNT initiative always reminded me of the "Evil Bit" joke: <a href="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt" rel="nofollow">http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt</a>

Most of us on Hacker News, from what I can tell, are generally against legislating the Internet. But, that's exactly what DNT requires to be effective, since it provides no technical barrier against tracking: either websites are legislated into being required to honor it, or it has essentially no value to users. As much as privacy is important, I'm actually glad that Chrome doesn't support DNT. Hopefully that will give reason for a better technical solution to be developed.

Working as a developer in an ad network I'm very interested in implementing this. However, said ad network doesn't currently provide an opt-out mechanism and Mozilla isn't doing a good job of providing me with arguments to take to management and convince them that a DNT opt-out is something they want. What do you think?

Why should people turn it on - when most people just don't care?<p>That's the same problem we have in the EU right now. The correct way to deal with cookies would be for people to enable or disable them in their browser, according to their personal preferences. Instead, the EU forces their cookie legislation on everybody, because most people are too lazy to fix their preferences.

since DNT is opt-in for ad networks it is about as useful as robots.txt. the good guys will honor it, but the bad guys - who users are really concerned about, will ignore it.<p>a better solution is to integrate tools to allow users to block third-party scripts, to fix bugs and improve cache handling headers that can be used to track users, and to not let any third-party scripts store any information on the client.

"This might be a bit low because the tracking for DNT is by IP address."<p>Tracking people using DNT? This is quite ironic.

DNT is like putting a note atop your plain text file asking unintended recipients to ignore the contents. What browsers need is something akin to encryption, where you're not asking for compliance, you're denying access.

It would be more interesting to know the adoption of this among website developers. And some use cases where it is beneficial for them (as I don't see any). As it is, it is quite useless. If the feature doesn't do anything, the numbers are just a consequence of the buzz done around it, nothing more.