- From: James Graham <jg307@cam.ac.uk>
- Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2006 17:38:41 +0000
dolphinling wrote: > dolphinling wrote: >> Ian Hickson wrote: >> >>> On Fri, 21 Oct 2005, dolphinling wrote: >>>> Like I said before, I like the semantics of ping=. But it doesn't >>>> fit into the usage model that advertisers and other trackers want. >>>> Semantically, I want notification and linking to be separate. In >>>> usage, they want them to be linked. They seem to me to be mutually >>>> exclusive. >>> >>> In my experience, "they" are ok with it being separate, as it conveys >>> a number of benefits to the user. (I would consider my source on this >>> matter reasonably authoritative.) >> >> Hmm... perhaps your source could explain his reasoning here? :) It's >> extremely easy to make non-circumventable tracking, and I assumed that >> most times it _was_ circumventable were due to ignorance rather than >> an informed decision. To me, it seems, the benefits to an advertising >> company of doing so outweigh the benefits of not. > > I'd still like to hear this reasoning for this :) And boy does it suggest this feature will be a marketing problem :( Darin Fisher blogged the Mozilla implementation[1] and received a stream of comments, many from people who clearly haven't thought about how easy tracking already is, to the effect that they will never use a browser with this feature etc. It's hardly a representative sample of people (since the more alarmed users are more likely to comment) but I can easily imagine grossly unfair headlines like "Firefox 3 allows advertisers to track you across the web", ignoring the fact that any browser that implements HTTP redirects supports the same feature in a much less transparent way. [1] http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/darin/archives/009594.html -- "It seems to be a constant throughout history: In every period, people believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you would have gotten in terrible trouble for saying otherwise." -- http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
Received on Wednesday, 18 January 2006 09:38:41 UTC