[geofft]

> the benefits of the DNT scheme

The benefit of the DNT scheme was to kill the lie that most users don't care. If 99% of users take positive action to change a default and say "Don't track me", it's believable. If a browser vendor says this, it's not.

Bear in mind that Do Not Track has _zero_ technical merit; it's equivalent to the "evil bit" prank RFC. Any merit it has must be political.

The value in DNT was going to be that we could convince advertisers that normal users do, in fact, care, and do, in fact, not want to be tracked. IE's decision is squandering what DNT attempts to communicate, and squandering that value. And so when you see advertisers _and_ web server developers rejecting IE 10's DNT indicator, that doesn't mean that the advertisers or web server developers are bad people -- that just means that you lost the politics.

[wpietri]

That puts Microsoft in a bind. Sensible defaults are important; if you can guess what users want most of the time, then you should just do that.

In their shoes I would have done some focus groups, spending an afternoon with people and really educating them on the details of tracking, and what the pros and cons are for them. If at the end of it most typical users would have turned it on, then this would have been the right default.

After all, if places like Yahoo don't like it, they could ask people to turn it off. If Yahoo's right, then presumably most people would turn DNT off, or make an exception for them. But I suspect Yahoo knows that people don't want to be tracked, and that a lot of their profit comes from keeping their users in the dark.

[geofft]

> Sensible defaults are important; if you can guess what users want most of the time, then you should just do that.

That is a good general rule. In the case of DNT, the header was formulated specifically with the intent that the default would be off, regardless of what you expect the user to want, so that turning it on communicates individual user intent. This is a reason to ignore the general rule in this specific case.

A good related example would be license agreements. Most users want to ignore them entirely. Focus groups would indicate skipping them. But if you make a click-through license agreement invisible, while that's a better UX, the agreement is now completely legally invalid. In order for the agreement to be valid, you need the user to have an opportunity to read it (even if focus groups indicate nobody does).

And while you expect 100% of your users to accept the agreement, the default needs to be "No, I do not accept".

[icebraining]

If Yahoo's right, then presumably most people would turn DNT off, or make an exception for them.

Nope, there are other reasons why one wouldn't turn it off: confusion, ignorance, laziness, etc. Everyone in tech support knows how hard it is to get users to perform simple tasks even with step-by-step guidance.