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You have to assume they at least wouldn't allow the question to be presented in a straw-man manner like that; nobody would agree to being tracked if they didn't see what the point of the tracking was. The actual positive form of the question, ignoring the politics and just thinking about user intent, would be something like "Do you want this computer to serve a unique fingerprint to websites, allowing companies to both reconstruct your identity between sites on their network, or to persist your identity after you have purged cookies and other session data? Companies tend to use this tracking ability to enhance your advertising experience, to collect statistics on the usage of their sites, and to ensure they don't double-count you. Malicious uses of this data are also possible, though currently rare." The important bit of the question, when phrased this way, is that it doesn't just ask about a mechanism (the DNT header), but about the user's intent—and because of that, it's activation state could be made to control all sorts of things besides the DNT header. For example, saying "no" to the question should cause the browser to try to add some per-domain jitter to its answers to questions about what links are visited, what fonts are installed, what the User-Agent string is, etc., so that the browser can't be fingerprinted. |
The idea that advertising needs "enhancement" sounds suspicious. Couching the premise of the question in 77 words of pseudo-legalese-style terms and conditions would muddy the waters, and sow confusion, and probably innure users to do anything to make the checkbox go away, so they can simply get to the internet.
Politics aside, that kind of twisting and turning smells like a dark pattern, in my opinion.