NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Re: Yahoo will ignore Do Not Track for IE10 users
On 10/27/2012 5:14 AM, Jerry Leichter wrote: > This is the right way to deal with varying browser capabilities, too. Then browser ID strings can fade away, having outlived any useful purpose. Except... what do you do when a terminal (or a browser) says that it supports capability X, but does something completely non-standard with it? That's the situation with IE10: it presents the "Do not track" header by default, when the standard says that "Do not track" shall be off by default. I'm not sure just what M$oft thinks they are doing here. I can't imagine what commercial value M$ thinks they will gain from making the web less useful. The web runs off of advertising. "Tracking" makes that advertising more valuable and means that more expensive content can be served. So the idea was that people who really care will set "DO not track", and they will have some information about them (parts of their browsing history) a little bit more protected, and the web can continue to operate because most users won't care enough to change the setting. Of course, if enough users turn on "do not track", web designers may respond in various ways: making only a subset of the site available, charging for access, or perhaps displaying a page telling people that the site can only be used with tracking enabled, and how to turn off "Do not track" in various browsers. If I were running a commercial website, I might simply refuse to serve content to IE10. That would make IE10 a huge success... NOT! What comes to my mind is a famous story that thriller director Alfred Hitchcock used in the 50s to introduce a commercial: "When I was in college, my Uncle Frank used to take me out for dinner now and then. We`d go to an expensive restaurant, and while we ate, Uncle Frank would tell me these long, boring stories about himself. But no matter how boring or self-serving the stories were, I always listened politely, because, after all, Uncle Frank was paying for the dinner. Now I don`t know what reminded me of all this, but it`s time for a commercial." _______________________________________________ nnsquad mailing list http://lists.nnsquad.org/mailman/listinfo/nnsquad