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by city41 4925 days ago
I was hoping for DDG to go into the technical side of DNT at least a little bit, even at a very high and simple level. But really this is just an ad for DDG that's mostly based on instilling fear. I didn't find it very effective.

EDIT: to be fair, the sister site: http://donttrack.us/, is closer to what I was expecting. But still vague and still feels like it's just trying to instill fear.

1 comments

We struggled with this actually, but the technical reality is that it currently means nothing to the point that it might as well do nothing technically. And that's the point of the site -- not to scare, but to say this setting that is now in your browser doesn't do anything, and even when and if it does, it isn't likely to do what you think it does, i.e. not track you.

Here's the current state: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/29/technology/mediator-appoin...

Basically, the talks have completely broken down to the point the advertisers are delegitimizing the W3C proposals, which are incidentally not finalized either.

And you have the big sites waiting on the sidelines and explicitly telling people they're doing nothing: https://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an...

Twitter is the exception: https://support.twitter.com/articles/20169453#

So you have this setting out there in the wild in all the major browsers that literally does close to nothing.