LWN: Comments on "Web tracking and "Do Not Track""

Web tracking and "Do Not Track"

muwlgr — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 08:09:00 +0000

To my mind, this looks just too similar to RFC 3514 ("Evil bit"), and is going to be implemented and supported equally well :>

Selectively enable cookies

idupree — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 02:14:56 +0000

Tracking often uses a lot more data than cookies. For example see https://panopticlick.eff.org/ . User-Agent, preferred this or that, IP address, etc... even without cookies, sites can have a pretty good guess at keeping a timeline about you.

MSIE block lists

dmarti — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 19:35:46 +0000

This looks like a promising approach for handling blocking lists within the browser: IE9 and Privacy: Introducing Tracking Protection. Would be interesting to see extensions for the Free browsers that support the same lists.

Web tracking and "Do Not Track"

job — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 21:34:46 +0000

What incentives could the advertisement networks possibly have to honour these opt-out systems?

Wouldn't a client implementation, where the browser simply ignores setting these cookies, be a more robust solution? I believe all the common browsers today offer "private surfing" modes that work this way.

"Do Not Track"

smadu2 — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 21:24:16 +0000

http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt . They seem to maintain a huge list of all websites which are either ads, disregard privacy, etc ... and can be cat'ed to /etc/hosts file.

"Do Not Track"

ballombe — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 18:06:15 +0000

This is an extract from my /etc/hosts:
0.0.0.0 quadzero
0.0.0.0 a.tribalfusion.com
0.0.0.0 www.google-analytics.com
0.0.0.0 pagead2.googlesyndication.com
0.0.0.0 ad.doubleclick.net
(etc.)

This is not perfect, but it sure beat maintaining opt-out cookies.
It has the added benefit of not slowing down browsing when one of those service is down.

Selectively enable cookies

felixfix — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 03:34:55 +0000

I disable cookies, then selectively enable them (in Firefox preferences) for sites that I choose. Sometimes it's a nuisance; citi credit cards jumps to a completely different site (cardonline.com or some such) after you log in, so the first time you do it, you just grit your teeth and cuss 'em out under your breath. Most I only allow to have session cookies.

If this tracking is something different, please let me know.