Microsoft has announced that it will no longer enable the “Do Not Track” header by default in its next-generation web browser, codenamed Spartan. This move is a sharp reversal for Microsoft, which weathered substantial criticism from industry groups after it decided to enable DNT by default in Windows 8 and IE10.
Microsoft has laid blame for this change squarely at the World Wide Web Consortium’s door. The latest version of the DNT standard states: “The signal sent MUST reflect the user’s preference, not the choice of some vendor, institution, site, or network-imposed mechanism outside the user’s control; this applies equally to both the general preference and exceptions. The basic principle is that a tracking preference expression is only transmitted when it reflects a deliberate choice by the user.”
The problem with this thinking is that the overwhelming majority of users in every context never change default settings. That’s why Microsoft enabled DNT by default (well, that’s the idealistic reason), and that’s why putting the standard back in neutral means the majority of people will never use it. The larger issue at hand, however, is that the Do Not Track standard has been watered down to the point of uselessness. Most large companies simply ignore the header, and the entire point of DNT was that it was a voluntary buy-in, a collaboration between privacy advocates and advertising companies facilitated through the W3C itself. Some of the debated proposals would have sharply limited the ability of small advertising firms or businesses to track information, while simultaneously carving out vast exceptions for the likes of Google and Facebook.
The battle lines were clear in short order. Privacy advocates wanted robust protections that would limit what kinds of data could be collected, how much sites could follow you, and for a majority of high-tech companies to sign on as respecting these restrictions. Advertising firms, and those that make their living on your personal information, weren’t interested in any of these restrictions. Privacy advocates wanted the opt-out to cover all tracking, advertisers wanted opt-outs to be construed as narrowly as possible, or to focus explicitly on specific types of tracking — thereby leaving the door open to the development of new methods that wouldn’t be included in the previous agreement.
Officially, of course, DNT isn’t dead — Microsoft, after all, is making these changes to abide by the standard, implying that there is a standard to be abided to and utilized. But with the project neutered, voluntary, and multiple large companies loudly proclaiming they won’t abide by it, the writing is clearly on the wall. Yahoo and AOL have both opted out, as has Facebook.
Consumer apathy, combined with massive conflicts of interest, have virtually guaranteed that any attempt to create an actual privacy standard is doomed to fail. There’s no way that the massive Internet giants, who make tens of billions of dollars on user information, are going to voluntarily embrace standards that restrict their right to do so — and no privacy standard that kowtows to the rights of such company can possibly succeed in protecting user rights.
For now, the only person respecting your own right to privacy, or to not be ruthlessly tracked across every aspect of your Internet usage, is you — and while browser plugins and anonymous browsing can help in certain areas, even approaching something like anonymity requires a dedicated commitment to the task.
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