[dylan604]

Why do we believe the Googs will actually honor this flag? If it's just an HTTP header, the browser can be made to just act like it's not there. All of these "flags" are essentially honor policy level things (just like robots.txt), but if the thing is not even told to look for the flag, there's nothing stopping from doing exaclty what is being asked not to do.

[jasonvorhe]

They've been respecting robots.txt and tracking opt-outs for years, right? Just one whistleblower and it's over. Why risk it? Also: Afaik it's opt-in after it leaves Origin Trial phase [1].

[1] https://twitter.com/Log3overLog2/status/1384337637763387394?...

[shakna]

> They've been respecting robots.txt and tracking opt-outs for years, right?

Sort of. Kind of.

googlebot only respects part of robots.txt, the part that refers specifically to itself. It doesn't respect global robots.txt rules.

Google also explicitly don't really respect the disallow rules:

> However, robots.txt Disallow does not guarantee that a page will not appear in results: Google may still decide, based on external information such as incoming links, that it is relevant. If you wish to explicitly block a page from being indexed, you should instead use the noindex robots meta tag or X-Robots-Tag HTTP header. In this case, you should not disallow the page in robots.txt, because the page must be crawled in order for the tag to be seen and obeyed. [0]

[0] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/robots/ro...

[smilliken]

Googlebot also doesn't respect crawl delays in robots.txt.

[gentleman11]

So they respect “do not track” headers?

[jasonvorhe]

No, but almost everyone ignored it and it never matured out of Candidate Recommendation:

> Efforts to standardize Do Not Track by the W3C in the Tracking Preference Expression (DNT) Working Group reached only the Candidate Recommendation stage and ended in September 2018 due to insufficient deployment and support. [...] Despite supporting it in its Chrome web browser, Google did not implement support for DNT on its websites, and directed users to its online privacy settings and opt-outs for interest-based advertising instead. The Digital Advertising Alliance, Council of Better Business Bureaus and the Direct Marketing Association does not require its members to honor DNT signals.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track

[h_anna_h]

Not that long ago there was a story about the google analytics opt out addon at https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout not doing anything.

[dylan604]

>They've been respecting robots.txt

sorry, wasn't meaning to imply Googs ignores robots.txt. I was going for conceptually it is easy to ignore it, just as it is easy, conceptually, to ignore HTTP headers.

>and tracking opt-outs for years, right?

is this provable? if i opt-out with my g-account in the browser on a desktop, that should imply i want out of all tracking, yet you have to do it on each app on each platform. it's wack-a-mole that is impossible to win.

[thatguy0900]

Google does a lot of shady stuff but they're a pretty sue-able entity, not some fly by night unknown data broker. If they say they will respect robots.txt and floc headers they probably will. They are surely collecting whatever data they want in other ways anyway.

[kmonsen]

Chromium is open source? We still don’t control releases but having the open source version it should not be too hard to reverse engineer and see if they messed with it.

[edoceo]

How about in the G internal Chrome branch?

[yesbabyyes]

We believe it because Google submitted the permissions-policy header / attribute (which allows a site owner to control the permissions for a lot of things apart from interest cohorts, such as geolocation, fullscreen etc) and because we have no choice.

The organization controlling "the thing" is the entity that asked for the feature, so we believe the thing will both know about it and honor it.

[TheRealDunkirk]

Counterpoint: Google makes billions of dollars from tracking and collating behavior across sites. If this impacts revenues more than they would like, the bet's off. There's a breakpoint here, and it's probably lower than people outside the company would expect.

[blauditore]

Are you working at Google and have more insights into this?

[slver]

They will respect this flag for liability purposes.

It's the only purpose this flag has.