[dguido]

It seems odd that DNT is a controlled at the browser-level and turning it on instructs every site to "not track me" (whatever that means). There are some sites that I want to be tracked by and DNT is an all-or-nothing control. This seems really poorly thought out.

There's a tenuous relationship between DNT and DuckDuckGo too. On one hand you've got a small group of unknowns who profess not to keep logs (but who knows, right?) and on the other you have a slapdash attempt to regulate the ad industry. Use DuckDuckGo because it's a good search engine.

[tytso]

I'm not convinced DuckDuckGo is such a great search engine. If I do a search for "Newtown", the first returned item was for the Newtown in New South Wales.

A search engine which knows that I live in the US and am interested in things in the US can more easily figure out that the Newtown that I'm interested in is the one in Connecticut in the United States.

Everyone tends to talk about the "filter bubble" as if it were always a bad thing, but editorial decisions are a good thing. To say that you always have to "teach the controversy" means that you fall into the trap that newspapers in the US have fallen into, where they feel obliged to give equal time to people who deny global warming, or people who try to argue that you need automatic weapons to hunt deer, or people who claimed that tobacco doesn't cause cancel, as people who have the backing of science behind them.

More positively, is the fact that newspapers to refuse to print stories about the moon landing being faked, evidence of the "media bubble"? If so give me more of it. I want more editorial filtering by the media, not less.

[Millennium]

The things you discuss, though, are things you would apply over the mass of people based on (ostensibly) observer-independent factors. That's not the sort of bubbling to which DDG and its ilk object, because it is not based on individualized preferences, nor is the data gathered by tracking people.

It could be argued that it's a sort of bubbling nonetheless, based on the preferences of some unspecified authority rather than each individual. But that's outside the scope of what DDG tries to address anyway.

[Dylan16807]

Filtering based on location, language, and current time are all very logical. I have no problem with that. The 'bubble' problem is more about personal filtering. Who you are, what you do on the web.

But I object to your middle paragraph. Editorial decisions have nothing at all to do with bubbles. Bubbling is altering results based on the individual user, there is no connection to the results of mass media prioritization.

Basically, what you want isn't bubbling.

[Millennium]

DNT is really not much more than an HTTP header. Browsers could be set up to send that header to some sites and not others, and that behavior could be made configurable.

[mtgx]

Agreed. And DNT does give me a false sense of security. I set it on, and then I just imagine that no ad agency can track me anymore. This is not just a theory. It's exactly what I intuitively thought when I clicked "on" for it, even though I know that's not really what it does. But that's all the pro-DNT marketing made me feel about it.

I should at least be able to see a log of what ads or links I blocked using DNT. Otherwise it's all pretty pointless.