Re: Comments on tracking-compliance.html

Le 26 oct. 2011 à 10:43, Justin Brookman a écrit :
> If a user today sets her browser to "block third party cookies," a third party cannot evade that control by putting in a license agreement "you consent to our placing third party cookies despite any browser settings."  

The case is simple here. The user just blocks at the client 
level the possibility for the Web site to save something on 
his hard drive. There is no issue at all. The same thing can 
happen with "blocking URI/content APIs". It gives control to 
users.



> Similarly, if a user sets her browser to "Do Not Track" (or whatever her browser calls the setting), Acme shouldn't be able to ignore that instruction by reserving the right to ignore that instruction in a place the user is unlikely to notice.

Acme is able to ignore anything. It just means that they are 
not compliant. But as long as the user is sending which is 
identifiable, the other party may use it. It is exactly for 
the same reason that robots.txt are not useful to block search 
engines, spam robots, etc. Some like Google respects robots.txt
but nothing technically forces them to do so. 

As an example, my own site is publicly accessible, but I block [1]
the indexing by search engines. I have also an atom feed. Some 
readers were using Google Reader for reading the content of my 
Web site. My surprise was that my content was indexed in Google
search engine. Google reader was feeding the search engine 
through their back-end without checking robots.txt. My only way 
to block it was a mechanism on my side in Apache configuration 
file to block any requests from Google Reader (identified with
the user agent string.) Since Google fixed the issue after the 
help of Ian Fette.


That said is that you can give mechanisms to achieve things but 
as soon as you share information on the wire there is no technical 
way to avoid it will not be used inappropriately. 

[1]: http://www.la-grange.net/robots.txt



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

Received on Friday, 28 October 2011 18:52:55 UTC