It's possible they were looking for an excuse and lying. But enabling it by default definitely seemed to defeat the entire point of the fragile agreement. It doesn't matter to them whether it's better for users.
My entire point is that if it was a "fragile agreement" it wasn't in good faith and it was lying and waiting for any excuse to break it, by definition. It doesn't matter what excuse broke it. It was always a bad faith attempt to score some regulatory points and it was never about actually doing good for users. They never should have offered a "standard" for such a "fragile agreement" they didn't really believe in, and everything they said about it was hypocrisy.
I haven't seen any particularly compelling evidence it wasn't in good faith.
It was an "attempt to score some regulatory points and it was never about actually doing good for users". But that was always obvious because it was companies doing it.
It still would have done good if it was implemented.
Again, it was implemented and it didn't do any good, on purpose as soon as users tried to actually use it.
It's not a good faith agreement if "we agree to do this only so long as the setting to enable it is in the sub-sub-basement of the browser locked in a closet marked 'Beware of Leopard'". If it wasn't "oh no a browser enabled it by default" it would have been "oh no a tutorial went viral on social media telling people how there isn't really a leopard and that everyone should just open that closet and click the button", because again the excuse doesn't matter why they stopped supporting it they never planned to support it for more than the theory of it. There's always some other excuse. It was only ever a "heisenberg feature": it can either not be used or it could just not exist. I'm saying it's not possible at all to design a "heisenberg feature" like that in any possible definition of "good faith". If it wasn't designed to be used by even a paltry 5% of users at the time they balked and stopped supporting it, it wasn't designed in good faith. There's no way to look at that and think they meant anything about any of their promises when they said they'd support it.
You can keep claiming bad faith and that they would have used any excuse all you want, but if you don't back that up with anything but gut feeling then I'm not going to be convinced.
Yes it would be bad faith if this thing you're claiming is true. It would help if you had some evidence.
"We agree to let users opt out." is a pretty simple proposition and the motives make sense. It helps those users and it significantly reduces the demand to regulate them, but doesn't cost much money. Removing the part where users do the opting is a very different situation. Balking at that does not require bad faith. It requires they not have the users' best interests at heart, but... yeah, we knew that. If they did then ads would be much rarer and much less invasive, if they existed at all.
We probably have very different perspectives. I feel like I should warn you that you are very close to an ad hominem attack and I don't appreciate that.
My perspective from over a decade of software engineering is that you cannot ethically build a (privacy) feature that is "only ever to be opt in only" and not expect (privacy) experts to make a big deal about it ("hey everyone should opt in to this thing that makes your privacy better") and/or encourage other (browser) manufacturers to go ahead and make it default option ("this would make privacy better for non-expert users"). That's not an ethical feature, that's a bait-and-switch no matter what the timescale is between "this feature is opt-in only" and "oh no too many users opted in".
I am making a very opinionated judgement in leaping from it's not just a feature that was designed unethically, but that it was morally wrong for them to do so. It's fine if you don't agree that a bunch of people made a morally bad judgement call in building and marketing that feature. I believe that entire hype cycle of that feature did far more to setback privacy debates on the web for years than it did to help. I believe by making some of those morally wrong decisions years back Chrome established once (and maybe for all time) that their privacy teams cannot be trusted to build equitable/ethical/fair privacy systems. I worry that Mozilla is the last big opposition standing up to this behavior and I worry about what will happen if we lose Mozilla in this fight to keep an eye out for what other "privacy" ideas the Chrome team generates that should (rightfully) be deemed 'Harmful'.
I really don't expect you to agree with me at this point. The number of Firefox users left is abysmally tiny according to statistics. Chrome has won, despite whatever it is I (and I hope Mozilla continues to) think about their (lack of) professional ethics. At this point I'm only breaking it down for you as much as I can not to try to convince you, but to feel like I've done my part to say that I believe what Google did with DNT was very wrong, if not very evil, because there aren't a lot of people left to speak out against such wrongs. Because we as a profession don't have a proper ethics board to try these sorts of things in a court of our peers rather than let them fester and rot in the halls of companies that some people still believe the "Do No Evil" marketing despite actions they have taken.
I'm not sure what you think is close to ad hominem, but I'm sorry.
> My perspective from over a decade of software engineering is that you cannot ethically build a (privacy) feature that is "only ever to be opt in only" and not expect (privacy) experts to make a big deal about it ("hey everyone should opt in to this thing that makes your privacy better") and/or encourage other (browser) manufacturers to go ahead and make it default option ("this would make privacy better for non-expert users"). That's not an ethical feature, that's a bait-and-switch no matter what the timescale is between "this feature is opt-in only" and "oh no too many users opted in".
Well I never said it was a particularly "ethical" feature. If they wanted to be ethical they would shut down 90+% of ads.
But you're making a big assumption here, that privacy experts bugging people about it and browsers making it the default would get the same response.
My bet is that privacy experts bugging people about it would have been tolerated just fine, and that most people still wouldn't flip the switch.
But browsers changing the default is qualitatively different from the user being able to set it.
I think your characterization of "too many users opted in" is flat-out wrong. The browser is opting, not the users. And it's not like people were choosing Edge because it would opt them out. That's a completely negligible percent of people.
Another way the two are different is very simple: If you had a big fraction of users manually flipping the switch, and the advertisers tried to cancel the feature because that was too many users, you could mobilize those tens of millions of people into a powerful political campaign to bake DNT into law.
> I believe that entire hype cycle of that feature did far more to setback privacy debates on the web for years than it did to help.
Maybe. But I'd still rather have privacy set back and have sites respecting my do not track header vs. privacy set back and it's completely useless...
As for the rest of your post, I'm confused about what you're accusing the Chrome devs in particular of doing? I agree that they're a big problem, see also flock, but with DNT they're not responsible for what the advertising group does. What could they have done better?