"They made statements to suggest they want it to be enforceable, but not enough details on how that is going to happen." AdvertisementĪn industry group called the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) said advertisers will respect Do Not Track preferences in cases where the user "has been provided language that describes to consumers the effect of exercising such choice including that some data may still be collected," but not in cases where "where any entity or software or technology provider other than the user exercises such a choice."Ī skeptical interpretation of these statements is that the default privacy settings of browsers won't be respected, and that even straightforward language "might turn into some slippery legalese that doesn't promise to do much of anything about tracking," EFF activism director Rainey Reitman states in a blog post. "I don't think the White House announcement gives us enough detail to know for sure," she said. After the White House announcement, she was still skeptical that Do Not Track can be enforced. Prior to the White House agreement, Cranor said she worried that Do Not Track will end up being just as unenforceable as P3P. Yet in the past ten years, "I don't know of any regulator that has gone after a company for P3P violations," Cranor said. Lorrie Faith Cranor, who chaired the P3P working group for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), told Ars last week that she and her colleagues spoke with governments around the world, and were told that P3P was enforceable under privacy laws. It turns out Google, Facebook, and thousands of other websites have found simple technical workarounds to trick P3P into letting the tracking continue. P3P, which is only implemented by Microsoft's Internet Explorer, blocks third-party cookies unless presented with a policy statement promising not to use the cookie to track the user. Do Not Track could ultimately supersede another privacy standard built ten years ago, called P3P, or the Privacy Preferences Project. But getting the FTC to act is no simple matter. The White House said companies that make the Do Not Track commitment "will be subject to FTC (Federal Trade Commission) enforcement." Apparently, that means companies that choose not to make the commitment will not be subject to FTC enforcement.įortunately, the biggest players are covered by the agreement. It was only several days later that the White House announced its new agreement with Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL.īut will Do Not Track really work? The idea is a simple one: give users a button that, when pressed, will send websites an HTTP header that signals the user's preference not to be tracked. The EFF recently argued that Google's circumvention of default privacy settings in Apple's Safari browser in order to serve up advertising cookies shows the need for a system like Do Not Track. "We're looking at a Web that has been built around the advertising business model and now we want to retrofit privacy back into the Web, and we run into these deep and hard-to-resolve tensions," said Peter Eckersley, technology projects director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And in the case of the world's biggest advertiser- Google-the advertising company is also the maker of one of the most world's popular browsers, Chrome. While a good step toward broader Web privacy protections, the agreement itself illustrates the difficulties of enforcing privacy guidelines on the Web: we must rely on advertisers to police themselves and on browser makers to implement functionality that helps users opt out of behavioral tracking. Last week, the White House announced a new Internet privacy agreement with the companies serving nearly 90 percent of " online behavioral advertisements," theoretically forcing the likes of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL to stop monitoring the Web-surfing habits of users who click a "Do Not Track" button on their browsers.
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