Yahoo Dings “Do Not Track” Default (And Search Partner Microsoft) | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo Dings “Do Not Track” Default (And Search Partner Microsoft)

allthingsd.com

22 pointskuida0r311 comments

Could this perhaps have been Microsoft's intention? They've implemented a widely unpopular feature that is bound to be circumvented on a large scale. They basically bastardized the execution of DNT, making it moot while at the same time protecting them from any personal liability. Or am I being cynical?

Could be, but to be fair their implementation is in line with the DNT draft which says that DNT=1 is a valid default for user agents. Maybe the draft writers didn't think through what the consequences would be for DNT support if DNT=1 became the default in any majority of browsers.

The way I see it either the consequences for not respecting DNT need to be greater somehow or the default implementation can't be DNT=1 because third parties will simply ignore it. Without consequences, a default of DNT=1 just weakens the draft and hurts the people who really do want to block everything.

You're absolutely right. MS gets to say "We have the safest browser" and users get nothing but a false sense of security. Google and FF look bad for not implementing this same feature, even though it doesn't protect the user from anything whatsoever.

In order to respect user intent, we must ignore user intent which may be expressed via a recently added user setting, because the setting's default value interferes w/ our profit margin.

Orwellian.

I feel that this is is often blown far out of proportion, everyone sells the whole DNT option as the holy grail of privacy, but the honest truth is that not everyone cares about privacy, in fact, most people don't care about it at all.

Everyone seems to be confusing privacy with "tiny amounts of information" such as age, gender, etc. which most people are perfectly happy entering on basically any site.

It shouldn't be advertised as "Do not track gives you privacy" it should be advertised as "Do not track stops companies from saving personal information about you, such as age, gender and location. Whilst this increases your level of anonymity while you browse, it also lowers the companies ability to provide you with a valuable experience, for instance, it can stop adverts popping up which you may find irrelevant and will allow them to better follow your needs online."

It would be interesting to see a list compiled for the most popular services showing the features they would no longer be able to offer with DNT.

An intelligent response from Yahoo would have been to do exactly that : show a one-time popup to IE10 users that have DNT enabled and explain them what they win/loose.

But ignoring the setting is just plain arrogant.

In fairness, it would probably be much shorter than the features that would need to be removed from Google Analytics.

I didn't catch anything about DNT at all during setup on my Surface (not saying it wasn't there). Just tried to find the setting; it's not exposed on the Metro side at all, it's not in the logical place for it (the "Privacy" tab), rather in the "Advanced" tab and under the Security heading, nearly at the bottom of the list[0]. Microsoft's DNT position has always smelled like a political stunt, burying it like this doesn't do much to disprove that.

[0] https://www.dropbox.com/s/xslbzy04l37wnf7/Screenshot%20%289%...

This would sadden me if Yahoo offered the world anything of value.

Of course this is their response, and I'm sure the response of a lot of other advertisers, too. Microsoft is deciding for the user (the option to disable appears in an obscure place with the installation of Windows 8, which I'm sure most people will miss).

If they were serious about this, they would just block those cookies by default. Otherwise it's pointless, and having Microsoft decide for the user makes the advertiser's decision to ignore it even easier.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com