DNT (Do Not Track)
I´m wondering how many people (mostly advertisement companies) must be upset with this sounded header field (DNT)? I don't know but certainly the discussion goes around money (sometimes called User Privacy)
This matter is interesting to me and the “Online behavioral advertisers" seems not to be having right behavior as stated by Carnegie Mellon CyLab (http://www.cylab.cmu.edu/research/techreports/2011/tr_cylab11005.html)
"Online behavioral advertisers track users across websites, often without users' knowledge. Over the last twelve years, the online behavioral advertising industry has responded to the resulting privacy concerns and pressure from the FTC by creating private self-regulatory bodies. These include the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) and an umbrela organization known as the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA). In this paper, we enumerate the DAA and NAI notice and choice requirements and check for
compliance with those requirements by examining NAI members' privacy policies and reviewing ads on the top 100 websites. We also test DAA and NAI opt-out mechanisms and categorize how their members define opting out. Our results show
that most members are in compliance with some of the notice and choice requirements, but two years after the DAA published its Self-Regulatory Principles, there are still numerous instances of non-compliance. Most examples
of non-compliance are related to the "enhanced notice" requirement, which requires advertisers to mark behavioral ads with a link to further information and a means of opting out. Revised October 7, 2011"
that make you think ?
Independently of what is really happening here, privacy and my browsing tendency is in the middle of all this, so thanks Microsoft and IE10 for bringing this to the surface to me throu DNT.
Now lets talk about IE10 DNT
As Wikipedia says the do not track header is a proposed HTTP header field that would request a web application, Robot, Marketing Site to disable either their tracking or their cross-site tracking (the ambiguity has not been resolved yet) of a user.
The header field name is "DNT" and it currently accepts three values:
1 in case the user does not wish to be tracked (opt out),
0 in case the user consents to being tracked (opt in),
Null (no header sent) if the user has not expressed a preference. The default behavior in Internet Explorer 10 is to not send the header (DNT:1), until the user chooses to enable the setting via their browser.
Using fiddler we can see the header field:
If you want to enable tracking of your navigation in IE10 (and I don´t know why would you like to do that) this is the place to do it:
Also Microsoft has this page where you can validate if your browser is being tracked =)
http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/browser/donottrack/default.html