- From: Aleecia M. McDonald <aleecia@aleecia.com>
- Date: Sun, 28 Jul 2013 00:35:24 -0700
- To: "public-tracking@w3.org (public-tracking@w3.org) (public-tracking@w3.org)" <public-tracking@w3.org>
Just to step back for a moment, I do not think lack of user intent is the core issue. To recap: - From the start we agreed upon DNT unset if users had not been involved - In the US, this means users have not made a choice for privacy, and gets treated like DNT:0 - In the EU, this means users have not consented to tracking, and gets treated like DNT:1 Effectively we have DNT off by default in the US and on by default in the EU. We've been decided upon this since the very first meeting, back when the group was 40 people in a surreal building at MIT with no hotels to be found, &c. The assumptions baked into this consensus were that in the EU, anything less privacy protective wouldn't fly, and as for the US, who changes settings within their web browser? Maybe 5% would turn on DNT, so it would be better for companies to engage with DNT than to try to fight it. Sure, it could be a big leap from the DAA opt-out rates, but still likely to be tolerably low for the financial side. And then something really weird happened. US users have turned on DNT in their browsers at a truly surprising rate. Even without promotion, even without DNT being honored by most websites, we're looking at about 1/6th of users turning on DNT in Firefox. The incentives shift. The idea of supposing a principled argument about lack of user choice is a bit hard to take seriously given the EU treatment. From the first meeting, we've all been fine with EU users having DNT protection without making explicit choices to turn on DNT:1. It seems to me the challenges to DNT are not the ones we're talking about right this moment. Could we deal with real issues? Aleecia
Received on Sunday, 28 July 2013 07:35:49 UTC