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Comment by cronix | Hacker News Reader

It was a stupid premise to begin with. "Oh, please, here's all of my stuff, but I'm asking you to not track me. I trust you won't" vs "I don't trust you and block all 3rd party cookies and scripts from being accessed by my machine except those I know and trust and explicitly allow through"

It's like leaving your door unlocked and with a sign on it asking criminals to obey your privacy and not enter vs having a lock on the door and not allowing them through until they knock, you can verify who they are and decide at that point whether to open the door to them.

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It's only a stupid premise if you take the feature for face value and assume that the people behind it expected it to magically solve all of the tracking problems on the web. Alternatively, consider that it's a great opportunity for all those companies that "value your privacy" to put up or shut up. Then tools like Privacy Badger [0] get to call out advertising companies that assert that they only track consumers because that's what consumers want while explicitly ignoring the industry standard opt out mechanism.

[0] https://www.eff.org/privacybadger/faq#How-does-Privacy-Badge...

You can do both though - limit the amount of information you do send _and_ ask those that do respect it not to track the information you _must_ send.

Look I think we all know which is more likely to work in practice. It's sad that Do Not Track never took off, but let's not pretend to be surprised.

Its a completely pointless setting. No user would chose to be tracked and no tracker wants to shut down their business. You don't need a setting for it because everyone wants the same thing.

I have no issues with websites tracking my usage, as long as the tracking scripts aren’t making my browsing experience miserable. And, especially for things like affiliate links, I’d like to make sure that the people that influence my decision to purchase an item get some credit for it.

>I’d like to make sure that the people that influence my decision to purchase an item get some credit for it.

This is a negative user experience. Affiliate links mean that people try to recommend things they get paid to recommend rather than what they actually think is best

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