Consumer Groups Advocate for 'Do Not Track' Registry 146
eldavojohn writes "Consumer groups are asking for a 'do not track' registry to be implemented, similar to the successful and popular 'do not call' registry. Tracking companies are asking for examples where tracking has caused harm, and would rather the industry stay self-regulated. 'In December, the FTC approved Google's purchase of advertising rival DoubleClick over the objections of some privacy groups. At the same time, the agency urged advertisers to let computer users bar advertisers from collecting information on them, to provide "reasonable security" for any data and to collect data on health conditions or other sensitive issues only with the consumer's express consent.'"
What's with all these registries? (Score:5, Interesting)
Something I really don't understand here is why ANY reasonable person would not opt-out of any of these systems? (Granted, only the first one is actually coded into law) And how do you enforce them for companies based outside the USA? And for that matter, what's to stop companies from outsourcing their tracking offshore to skirt the laws?
Where is the"your post advocates a..." for this?
Re:What's with all these registries? (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah. Why not just create a "leave me the fsck alone" registry and be done with it.
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No solution is perfect. That's life.
Do-not-bug-me laws help businesses that respect them to have an advantage over lawbreakers. This is especially important with larger firms, since investors will want to know whether a company has a do-not-break-laws policy.
A do-not-bug-me database does not have to have a lot of personal information in it.
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Thanks!
Re:What's with all these registries? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't care if Google knows what websites I visit. Oooo! A single 29-year-old male goes to porn sites!! How EEEEEVIL of Google to know this!
No, I'm not going to see the ads. (Score:3, Insightful)
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If it weren't for interbutts advertising, all you'd find on the intertubes would be dry research material and 'HI THIS IS LARUENS [sic] HOMEPAGE AND HERE IS MY CAT PICTURES! HI THERE!@!! SIGN MAH GUEST BOOK~~~ MUAH~~~' type pages. Replete with spinning kitty paw gifs. And probably a few <marquee> tags.
We would not have rich internet news. Social news (e.g. digg and slashdot) wouldn't be viable. And forget free porn (outside of irc chatrooms run out of a basement in bulgaria to find
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Can we all say what industry self regulation is all about;
1) How to maximise profit
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I fail to see the problem...
Re:No, I'm not going to see the ads. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, those posts are irritating as hell. Please try to respond with original thoughts. Thank you.
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AdBlock just happens to be one method I use so I don't have to see ads. I mention it in passing, and you start frothing at the mouth and accusing me of being unoriginal. As if saying, "Hey, targeted a
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Ya know, I can't think of anything said with "That's all _x_ is" that is actually true.
There are actually some positive and helpful sides to advertising at least in my experience as a customer.
It's sometimes nice to know about the new services at that hospital they just built... or "I'm hungry but I don't know what sounds good tonight... ooh let's get THAT. (or conversely, no, definitely not THAT, but that gives me an idea)... or to find out about some show that looks interest
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Apple advertises all the freakin' time, so I guess that Apple products must be "lowest-cost items that offer no quality or durability." (Of course, then again, the iPod sets the market median, so I guess technically your statement still applies.)
You're also forgetting, or unaware, of brand advertising and trade group advertising, both of which are much different than traditional selling-of-products.
Brand advertising usually takes the form of sponsorships, Coke sponsors a local sporting event, payin
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Re:No, I'm not going to see the ads. (Score:4, Funny)
Were you saying something? I use DoucheBlock, so I don't see these things.
Re:No, I'm not going to see the ads. (Score:5, Informative)
Advertising in Most first world countries is anti-happiness. As explained by Professor Richard Layard: [abc.net.au]
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When I want to purchase something, I research it...Advertising and marketing are a complete waste of human energy at best...
You're a fool if you think that in general, advertising is not valuable to both the buyer and the seller. That is how buyers find sellers. You couldn't even begin researching your purchase if there wasn't some form of advertising letting you know what options are out there.
The problem isn't that ads exist, it's that they need to be more relevant when they're displayed. Google seems to be making this their mission and for that reason, and right now I'm happy to let them track what websites I look at a
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When I want something, I will seek it out. I'm not a sheep, I don't need to be led to pasture and shown where to graze. I don't need people telling me what I should want.
When I want something, I'll ask, thanks, so shut the fuck up, I don't want to hear what you have for sale.
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If a company doesn't tell what they produce, the public doesn't know it's there.
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So I find the original post's "You're going to see the ads anyway, why not see ads targeted towards
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Except if you're doing it right, you're not going to see ads.
I do agree with your point, however. The fact that I don't see the ads is the exact reason this list is unnecessary. The government shouldn't be "helping out" when the people can do it themselves.
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No, I don't. Which part, exactly, do you consider elitist? The part that expects people to take a little initiative to achieve something they want? Or the part that expects people to learn something?
I'm not the one assuming most people are morons, incapable of learning. So, tell me again, who's being elitist?
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Ignoring that- no I don't want to have more targeted ads. Its an invasion of my privacy- I did not give them permission to stalk me. I'm not going to buy their product regaurdless- I don't make impulse purchases. The last time I bought something I wasn't planning on a month in advanced (or wasn't an emergency replacement- like a light bulb burning out) was a good year or two ago.
Its also counterproductive for them- if I see a television, radio, print or
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What if visiting porn sites became illegal or the information was used by uptight employers to fire you?
Personally, I'm not so concerned about Google tracking me, but I'm concerned who they give it to even if what I do now is perfectly legal.
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Let's worry about actual problems, please. If porn were to become illegal, the US would have MUCH bigger problems than Google knowing what sites you like. And if uptight employers fire me, that's their right-- again it would be a much bigger problem if they weren't allowed to.
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And that one 29-year old must keep them all in business, while the rest of us go to Usenet for our fix.
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You're going to see the ads anyway, why not see ads targeted towards products you're interested in?
How do they know? I'm interested in most things, and I don't want to be limited to what I've seen before.
I hate having people put me in a box, demographic or otherwise. It denies me an essential view of things I've not encountered before. I'd rather be reincarnated as a lawyer before I'd ever stoop to behaving like some economist wants me to.
Two economists walk past a Porsche dealer. One says "I'd really like to have one of those new Boxters." The other one looks at him and replies "Obviously not."
If
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Ok, I've run your "joke" past three people now, and none of them have any clue what the sam hill you're talking about.
If you get that joke, I suggest you move to Facebook.
First of all, Facebook is a website... how would I go about "moving" to it? Secondly, I don't get that joke despite already having a Facebook account (if that's what 'move to Faceboo
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By "moving to Facebook" I was inferring that economists are better off polishing their social interaction skills by attending to that website rather th
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Yes, see, that I get. But bejeezus you're confusing.
I apologise for that, I was aiming for simple obscurity. But you are definitely to be congratulated for not getting the first joke, which requires a peculiarly Economics-focussed mind set. Here's another sample of what I was trying to achieve, but targeted at another occupation:
Two lawyers were walking down the beach past a stunning young lady. The first lawyer says "Geeze I'd sure love to screw her". The second lawyer looks at him quizzically -- "Out of what?"
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Plenty enough of people are opting out through services allowing individuals to see what information the big data brokers have on them, and to delete some of it, but not all data can be removed that way. They call it a "global do not call list [reputationdefender.com]". keeping with the FTC's US phone do not call registry [donotcall.gov]. If enough p
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I assure you whatever wisps of promise of hypothetical costs to me of tracking are overwhelmed by the benefits.
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Where is the "your post advocates a..." for this?
Right here! Although I haven't worked hard on the s/spam/tracking/ bit. Off we go:
Your article advocates a
(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting tracking. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
(One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may
have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal
law was passed.)
(X) Trackers can easily use it to harvest identities
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate ema
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As someone who lives outside the USA, I'm at least as concerned about how to enforce USA-based companies from tracking and annoying me.
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I would imagine that most US law enforcement agencies and secret police organisations are keenly interested in harvesting the details of these individuals in these conveniently located registries. I imagine they already do so.
I think the next logical step is to require fingerprinting for the criminals, err, suspects that sign up to these l
Nice Try (Score:3, Insightful)
but if you really dont want to be tracked, just turn off your cookies! (although there are ways to track without using them)
Re:Nice Try (Score:4, Interesting)
just turn off your cookies!
Ignoring for a moment the other ways to track me, I rather like being semi-permanently logged in to /. and a host of other sites. When I'm buying something, I don't want to have to go manually unblock the site so it can store my shopping cart data.
Does anyone know of a way to only block the "evil" cookies? I'd love something that blocked the tracking cookies, let the shopping cart ones through, and didn't require me to figure out which was which for each and every cookie.
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It won't eliminate tracking entirely, but my answer was to accept cookies from all sites, just for the duration of the session. Sites like Slashdot where I maintain an account have an exception in my Firefox cookie preferences which allows them to store cookies indefinitely. Shop
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The vast majority of sites don't need cookies, yet many place them anyway. I've been whitelisting my cookies for a while now and not having any major problems.
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So yes, I'm still being tracked per-session, but not across sessions - except for my nearly-static-IP Comcast connection's IP address, I suppose.
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Does anyone know of a way to only block the "evil" cookies? I'd love something that blocked the tracking cookies, let the shopping cart ones through, and didn't require me to figure out which was which for each and every cookie.
Yes.
CookieSafe Lite [mozilla.org] for Firefox.
It lets you block/enable cookies by site.
It also has a block-list subscription facility similar to adblock subscriptions.
I don't know how well the subscription facility works, but I do pretty well blocking everything and then enabling things on a case by case basis.
Block third party cookies (Score:2)
Just set this key:
"network.cookie.cookieBehavior" 1
Sites can get around this by doing a trick with frames. However, in practice, they never do this, and this technique works nearly 100%, and has no inconveniences beyond setting the key once.
Do not call registry? (Score:2)
Those calls may theoretically be illegal, but the laws aren't enforced.
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More Opt-Out Registries (Score:4, Funny)
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Of course, there is the problem with false positives, so the server would have to bounce back the e-mail but still send it to the subscriber's spam box. If the e-mail is legitimate the subscriber can submit that address and the ISP wil
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The only long-term solutions I can think of would be:
1. Never give out your e-mail address until you read and approve of the privacy policy or receive confirmation that it will not be sold or given out to spammers. Also, make sure that the server you give it to is secure enough to store your personal information so that it would take a reasonable amoun
Individually register to stay anonymous... (Score:5, Funny)
to stay identifiable during all your browsing so trackers know it is you.
You allow them to track you so they stop tracking you.
Soundy like a great idea?
Yeah, to me neither.
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1. All persons shall, by default, non-tracked persons.
2. Any person may request to be on the "tracked" list.
This goes for phone marketers and spammers.
Would you like to sign up to be tracked or spammed? Be my guest.
(This can be solved through technology. I'm working on it.)
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How about a smarter approach? (Score:2)
Instead, why not have a law that says you can collect and track all you want, but you can't resell that info? I t
How do you "not track" (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm probably not fully understanding, but how do you track people, but allow someone to "opt out". What I mean is, let's say you don't want DoubleClick to track you. So for them to abide by a "do not track" list, they need to set up some kind of identifier so that, when you visit a site where they would normally track you, they recognize it's you and stop tracking you. But that means you'd have to send them that identifier in every instance where they would track you, and they'd end up having to track you to make sure they don't track you.
I suppose they could just not store the collecting information, though. And no, I didn't RTFA.
Re:How do you "not track" (Score:4, Insightful)
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http://www.doubleclick.com/privacy/dart_adserving.aspx [doubleclick.com]
The catch being that if you do clear your cookies, you'll have to re-set the opt out cookie as well.
If you care, here's the URL to opt-out of the other big ad network:
http://www.atlassolutions.com/optout.aspx [atlassolutions.com]
I don't have all of them, but Doubleclick and Atlas cover something like 75-80% of the market.
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Easiest way to opt out (Score:3, Informative)
Noscript, ABPlus without much tweaking (Score:2)
I have all that installed along with an ABP filterset subscription, but other than me manually blocking Google analytics and syndication as untrusted, how effective is trusting those two solutions to block tracking?
Or do you really have to go nuts and setup manual ABP blocks for tracking vendor(s)?
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Wouldn't it be smarter to just block the ads? (Score:4, Insightful)
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This can be done in Firefox by setting cookies to expire at the end of the session and then using CookieButton to whitelist ones you want to keep (to stay logged into
Combine this with a daily modem reboot to change your IP address, and you are almost untrackable.
Cookies (Score:5, Funny)
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That certainly explains both the Cookie Crook and the Cookie Monster.
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Irony (Score:1)
Considering... (Score:2)
I wonder how this will be received...
And if they (the trackers) said they would comply, would you believe them?
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oxymoron (Score:1)
Worse, it'd be doing the hardest bit - connecting the dots.
How About a LMA Registry? (Score:2)
How are you going to identify people? (Score:2)
Better than CAN-SPAM? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's interesting how despite telcos like AT&T declaring they're going to police the Internet for copyright violation, and otherwise snoop content and traffic as they please, they don't seem to be implementing network spam filters, like with do-not-spam registries. Even though that would be very popular with users, and give the telcos each an excuse to get our contact lists, "to use as whitelists" (or whatever else they want).
There really should be a major push to enforce protecting our privacy. Every email system should operate with a whitelist by default, so only people you add (and maybe people on their whitelist) can get through to you. What would work even better would be micropayments to the recipient for each email they receive, with payments waived (or charged back in bulk or net) for those on the whitelist. Make the micropayments settable by the user (and variable even in the whitelist). Then spammers could pay me to spam me, if they can afford it, and I can make money off being spammed if I set the micropayments low enough. My associates will get to me for free, and new associates can pay to get my attention, then get it refunded if I accept their new contact (and then put them on the whitelist).
Otherwise the noise in our messaging systems really degrade their high value, and inhibit our making using them second nature. Just like what would have happened to the telephone if it were as cheap for telemarketers to annoy us as it is for them to spam us.
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That's how we manually decide we recognize people, and we're willing to work that
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oxymoron? (Score:3, Insightful)
A "do not track" ... registry? Is this a late April fool's day joke? It sounds like it could backfire. Wouldn't it mean that websites that track at all would be LEGALLY REQUIRED to obtain some piece of identifying information about you to check against the registry? And how could you prove a violation? Wouldn't it still pretty much rely on "self-regulation"?
As an aside, I used to work in a marketing department that had separate "do not call", "do not mail", and "do not email" flags for all their customers. Our group's policy (I can't speak for the whole company) was that if any of those flags were set, we wouldn't put them on any kind of contact list. I think the decision was still based on economics -- they figured the benefit of marketing to a few more people was outweighed by the risk of angering those people: "I'm sorry, sir, I see that you asked not to be mailed or emailed any more offers, but you didn't say we couldn't CALL you!"
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In order to not be tracked, one would have to be
tracking.txt (Score:1)
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Tag "dupe" (Score:2)
Junk snail mail yes, spam no. (Score:2)
Do Not Track: Oxymoron (Score:2, Redundant)
A better idea... (Score:2, Insightful)
More effective method (Score:2)
These are all stop gap problems. Next, when we have brain-mail, they'll start spamming that. And we'll need a new "list" for the same problem in a different format. We need to stop treating the symptom of the problem.
What we ought to do is discorporate any company that behaves like this, confiscate 100% of their corporate assets - donate them to schools - and imprison their executive members. Fine
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