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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

I opted out by setting the do-not-track header.

Very few advertising companies actually supported DNT, due to a lack of regulatory or voluntary requirements for its use.

> DNT is not widely adopted by the industry, with companies citing the lack of legal mandates for its use, as well as unclear standards and guidelines for how websites are to interpret the header. Thus, critics proport that it is not guaranteed enabling DNT will actually have any effect at all.

> — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track

Does that actually do anything? I was always under the impression the DNT header was just screaming into the void.

I recently saw the NYT has a paragraph in their CCPA document that speaks about the DNT header, although without using the word header. They say the text in the footer changes based on the opt-out so maybe they're handling that server side, but I haven't checked it

https://www.nytimes.com/privacy/california-notice

I've noticed that on some sites where I enable cookies and JS, the cookie banner/popup has fewer checkboxes preselected with DNT than without. I don't know how to check if they honor my choices, but at least this is something you could sue them over coz of GDPR.

You basically didn't

It's an industry standard. Folks better adhere to it or else they might get into legal trouble.

It doesn't have legal force. Wikipedia tells me it isn't really even a proper standard; standardisation efforts stopped when it became clear it wasn't going to be effective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track_legislation

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