Re: links: DNT, FTC and google, Creepy geoloc app

Bjoern,

Le 15 avr. 2011 à 18:25, Bjoern Hoehrmann a écrit :
> Without a specification that said, for instance, "Logging IP addresses
> for longer than 7 days, or deriving information from them that results
> in groups of users smaller than 5% of the country the user probably
> lives in, then you do not implement 'DNT'", there is some risk that the
> header is regarded as just "do not set cookie" with anything beyond that
> being fair game, which would make very little difference in practise.

(not speaking for Opera here. My personal opinion follows)
Yes, it is even worse than that.  I find the DNT header misleading and useless sincerely. It is a good will idea that could have nasty consequences by giving a false sense of not being tracked. Among the workshop papers (I haven't read all of them yet), there is this one which illustrate quite well the issue.

Position paper for the W3C Do Not Track Workshop
by Aleecia McDonald
http://www.w3.org/2011/track-privacy/papers/AleeciaMcDonald.pdf

    Part of the confusion with NAI opt- ‐outs may stem from
    the multiple ways in which NAI members implement
    opt- ‐outs. Some OBA companies stop collecting data when
    they read opt- ‐out cookies. Some companies, including
    Google, aggregate data from all users who opt- ‐out.
    Some companies, including Yahoo!, do not change their
    data collection practices. They stop showing ads
    tailored based on user data, but data collection
    continues unchanged. So much variation in outcomes poses
    a difficult communication problem. There is no one,
    simple answer to the basic question: what does an
    opt- ‐out cookie do?

and 

    61% of respondents expected that if they clicked a Do
    Not Track button, websites would collect no data at all.
    None of the current proposals for Do Not Track
    contemplate limiting data collection to nothing for
    first party use, yet that is what many users expect from
    Do Not Track.

Though I don't think the proposed solution of this article is good either.

-- 
Karl Dubost - http://dev.opera.com/
Developer Relations & Tools, Opera Software

Received on Friday, 15 April 2011 23:34:57 UTC