Microsoft Bends Over, Changes Its Mind Regarding DNT
Ad agencies rejoice.
Remember when Microsoft was all pro consumer, pro privacy and all that? Resulting in praises from various companies and users after it was decided to enable Do Not Track (DNT) by default in both IE10 and IE11?
Well, the good news are over as Microsoft has just changed its mind and won’t be enabling such feature by default.
Why? The recent W3C draft update now includes the following: “The basic principle is that a tracking preference expression is only transmitted when it reflects a deliberate choice by the user. In the absence of user choice, there is no tracking preference expressed”
Therefore, Microsoft says that websites that receive a DNT signal from the new browsers could argue that it doesn’t reflect the users’ preference, and therefore, choose not to honor it.
Does the explanation make sense? Of course not, for us it looks just like some fluff PR talk.
[Via: Microsoft]
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Vygantas is a former web designer whose projects are used by companies such as AMD, NVIDIA and departed Westood Studios. Being passionate about software, Vygantas began his journalism career back in 2007 when he founded FavBrowser.com. Having said that, he is also an adrenaline junkie who enjoys good books, fitness activities and Forex trading.
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Read the spec:
http://www.w3.org/TR/tracking-dnt/#determining
This is all a bit of a moot discussion, unfortunately. That said, as far as I know, Apache servers ignore the DNT requests from IE, automatic or not.