Microsoft sticks to its guns, keeps Do Not Track on by default in IE10

You present a false dichotomy. In the absence of asking consumers what they actually want in regards to tracking (whatever that means), it is impossible to know what their sentiment is. There are three kinds of people: those who are aware of DNT and have opted in, those who are aware of DNT and have opted out, and those who are not aware of the option. Guess which group is the largest.

You could certainly say that advertisers are intentionally playing dumb here, and would like to continue to do so by forcing the opt-in decision for DNT to be buried in layers of settings dialogs rather than having an opt-out decision front-and-center when installing windows.

But that doesn't imply that anyone thinks most people want to be tracked. It just implies that in the absence of intent one way or the other, advertisers will continue to treat consumers as they always have.

It all comes down to intent. Which is why the whole DNT header is a silly idea in the first place. See qntm's comment below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4355458.

"How, exactly, are they intending to detect the user's explicit consent via the medium of HTTP headers?"

(And, given the context of what the group is trying to do -- build a do-not-track mechanism that advertisers are willing to honor -- I agree that it's obvious.)

Here's the working group: http://www.w3.org/2000/09/dbwg/details?group=49311&publi...

I don't know enough to determine what % of companies represented on the panel are ad-supported; per a comment on the Microsoft blog:

  > thank you for not folding to the corrupt w3c standards 
  > body that is setting the standards with a full deck of ad 
  > supported companies on the panel

And then, as a sensible person, knowing that there exist people who don't care about laws, and knowing that law enforcement can't catch all criminals, you also use a lock.

I would love to have laws and penalties for lawbreakers here, but this is the internet: it spans many legal jurisdictions. Law is not a panacea, and it's also much harder to get than a software patch.

Which could also be exactly what they wanted: Get the good press for enabling the header by default while ensuring that they and everybody else will be able to track IE10 users normally, regardless of the setting being enabled or not.

In terms of revenue per impression, revenue/behavioral tends to beat out contextual. After contextual you've got site targeting and run of network, in that order. Google is the only one that does a really good job on contextual, that I've seen.

As of last month IE market share is now down to 16.4% (w3schools.) What IE does won't be so important because soon no one will be using it anyways.

The Explicit Consent Requirement is nonsensical. But then the DNT header itself is also nonsensical, because there's no legislation or tangible benefit to make request handlers respect it.

Nobody should be tracked unless they've explicitly asked for it.

Sure it does. When you're losing you need to differentiate, and Microsoft is choosing the "privacy first" route. It's fairly transparent, but it does get them a lot of press (almost all of the "they're really sticking to their principals" variety. At the same time I can't turn on my xbox without endless banners of ads).

From MS's perspective, that's a win-win.

And from a user's perspective it's a short-term win, long-term loss.

I think that the optimal response to IE and DNT is that every ad-supported site puts up a paywall for IE DNT users. If users associated IE with such a negative web experience, its use would quickly crater into the ground.

If this header would have only been useful if it was only enabled by a small set of people, then it has always been stupid, and is in no way Microsoft's fault. Imagine a perfect world where everyone using IE organically decided to poke around in their browser settings, find, understand, and enable DNT. Are the trackers now somehow less justified when they ignore it in this perfect world? No, the motivator is the same — they want to track as many people as possible and "disabled by default" is just a thin excuse. People that are defending the idea of trackers ignoring DNT because of IE are engaging in some weird kind of corporatism.

However, it doesn't change the fact that by enabling it by default, most other sites will likely end up just ignoring it, even if that isn't Microsoft's intent.

Besides, what happened to Google siding with the user even when their revenue was on the line? Wasn't that their corporate position with China? Or is that only the corporate position when it conveniently aligns with other interests?

This just seems like a no-brainer.

You can track a user during a single session on a single site.

To track across multiple visits the user must set up an account of some sort.

To track across multiple sites the user must provide some kind of explicit permission.

Anonymize any session records that don't have this kind of permission.

I never made an argument that depends on their market position. Either way, I don't think your comparison is apt. Competition isn't always good on its own; it has to increase global value/efficiency to be a valid, "good" strategy. Android increased global value, Microsoft's decision to go rogue on DNT will probably destroy value. Perhaps even their own.

Only if it benefits them or their users, which it almost certainly won't. Hurting your competitor is not the same thing as competing with them.

And by the way, please define "rich" and "rich enough".