Re: Today's call: summary on user agent compliance

Yep. Read the spec. You’re 100% correct ­ the spec says that the browser
must not ship with a default turned on, and the user must be given a choice.
So Microsoft is wrong and the spec is right. Great ­ and the person who gets
duped is the user. Sure everyone kept to the letter of spec but NOT the
spirit of the spec, because there is NO “choice mechanism” when the browser
is installed. 

RE: Sending DNT:1 does not in anyway improve privacy.

Again I have to agree with you. But what it does do is A) Express a choice
and B) Sets an expectation.

And the last point is critical. Once I turn on “Tell Web sites to Not Track”
I’m expecting magic. I don’t care one bit about 1st or 3rd parties or
anything else, what I expect is for it to all automagically happen on the
server and there should be no way for anyone to see what I’ve been doing.

That’s the expectation ­ if the spec cannot meet that expectation in the
minds of the consumer then it fails. And consumers are not technical. It’s
like saying what part of illegal don’t you understand. Same thing applies to
tell Web sites not to track me.




Peter
___________________________________
Peter J. Cranstone
720.663.1752


From:  "Roy T. Fielding" <fielding@gbiv.com>
Date:  Tuesday, June 12, 2012 4:12 PM
To:  Peter Cranstone <peter.cranstone@gmail.com>
Cc:  W3 Tracking <public-tracking@w3.org>
Subject:  Re: Today's call: summary on user agent compliance

> On Jun 12, 2012, at 12:47 PM, Peter Cranstone wrote:
> 
>> And there in lies the challenge of defining a user choice.
>> 
>> Microsoft sets the choice of ³Do Not Track²
>> 
>> Everyone else (Apple, Mozilla, Google, Opera, Yahoo) sets the choice to
>> ³Tracking allowed². (In the absence of the user being notified that they can
>> indeed make a choice the default is to track).
> 
> Please read the specification.
> 
>> So there you have it, opt-in vs. opt-out. Can you imagine the user now has a
>> choice. They can download a browser that by default offers more privacy or
>> they can chose the alternative. The real surprise comes later when they (the
>> consumer) find out that it¹s all optional for the content provider.
> 
> Sending "DNT: 1" does not, in any way, improve privacy.
> It's sole purpose and action is to indicate a user preference.
> It is not a light switch.  It does not turn anything on or off.
> What it does is tell the server something useful: that this user
> has chosen the following preference.  That's all.
> 
> The default of whether tracking is enabled or not given the
> absence of a user's expressed preference is determined by
> things entirely outside the scope of the WG: regional laws,
> out-of-band consent mechanisms, user account settings, the
> full moon, and other things that we are not concerned with.
> 
> ....Roy