Back where it started: “Do Not Track” removed from Firefox after 13 years
Firefox isn’t the last browser to drop Do Not Track, but it’s a symbolic end to a long, sad campaign to claw back a little privacy.
Makes sense. It was an idealistic idea that was never going to work because it would rely on advertisers honoring a consumer’s request.
And honestly just made you stick out like a sore thumb fingerprinting wise. Probably for the best honestly.
Unfortunate, but understandable :(
I wish we could rely on good faith with something like this, but it seems the only way is to block as much tracking as possible by force.
The Global Privacy Control toggle is legally enforceable and is actually followed by sites when enabled. I often get a toast from the site that confirms this, and it may even auto select the most private option in the cookie banner.
Without the force of law, this was never going to work.
Perhaps if the EU had used the presence of absence of the Do Not Track header as their method of determining cookie consent, it could have ended up being useful both from a privacy standpoint and to have saved us from the scourge of annoying as fuck cookie banners they ended up causing. Ah well.
Can't wait for the FUD posts about how Mozilla is the worst organization ever for removing this.
While the feature itself was not so useful, I do worry slightly about what the motivation for its removal might've been. People suggest that it's to avoid literally 1 bit of fingerprint data but the lack of more significant action on that front seems to contradict that idea. I didn't find any discussion of it in bugzilla, which used to be where you'd go to find out what the hell they're thinking.
Did they think nobody would notice? Are they going back to the bad old habit of removing features just for the sake of removing features? Did the fact that so many of their users have that flag set interfere with their ad tracking ambitions?
Did they think nobody would notice?
Very unlikely, they're doing it openly and they know from experience that all changes are always immediately reported in the community. They operate this way by choice.
Are they going back to the bad old habit of removing features just for the sake of removing features?
Doubt it, DNT is not only useless it is misleading as the user may think it is effective while in reality it allows "better" fingerprinting.
Did the fact that so many of their users have that flag set interfere with their ad tracking ambitions?
Source? I thought reports had usually been that it saw extremely low adoption on the client but maybe I'm wrong. Best rates I could find was <9% on desktop and 19% on mobile but that's back when it was most talked about.
If "do not track" was already in use by 10-20% of Firefox users a year after it became available, at a guess I'd say maybe it got to at least 20-30% over time, considering how popular the idea became in the years following that. But let me know if you find actual data I guess, that might be interesting.
At any rate, having to refrain from tracking ad attribution by default for even just 10% of users would be a substantial cost in the future where that system becomes a big source of revenue.
I'm not saying that's their motivation, just that it seems roughly plausible that it might be, in the absence of a better explanation.
That is disappointing
In reality nothing really changes.
I always thought it was a stupid idea to try and ask companies not to track you, instead of, you know, blocking trackers without telling them.
It really does seem like the advertising equivalent of BP's "carbon footprint", because the company doesn't like the alternative. In this case the alternative is blocking all ads and trackers for maximum user privacy. The commercial interests of modern web services and advertising services don't align with the values of privacy conscious users. So instead of pushing for things to try and make the advertisers feel more comfortable, make the users feel comfortable and encourage them to block that crap, and poison their fingerprinting data. These things benefit user privacy so much more than asking not to be tracked politely, and advertisers don't like them because they can't just choose not to listen or track the amount of users who don't want to be tracked.
