Jonathan Kew wrote: > On 16/5/14 14:37, Kyle Huey wrote: >> On Fri, May 16, 2014 at 6:30 AM, Curtis Koenig <curt...@mozilla.com> >> The point being made is that the preference is not a real choice. If >> you disable this feature you can still be tracked in the exact same >> way by methods that exist today and are not covered by the preference. > > Yes; but the methods being used by at (least some major) sites are > visible to the user, which makes them less insidious than an > invisible-by-design tracking feature.
I doubt that the common user will notice any of these tracking measures. Even I wouldn't notice if I don't pay attention or the network would not sometimes be slow to load. > If we implement <a ping>, and make it on-by-default (but with a user > preference to turn it off), we can reasonably expect sites to use this > as their tracking method in place of redirects, etc. And if they hten > detect (can they?) that the user has turned off pings and fall back to > other methods to track the user - who by disabling it has expressed a > desire not to be tracked - this puts them in much the same category as > those who decide to stop honoring Do Not Track. Web pages can't detect whether pings are actually sent, they know when those arrive at their endpoints. Thus if a website is concerned about Firefox users having turned this feature off they might just keep it the way it currently is and thus be sure it works for every user. > We can't force sites to honor DNT, and we can't prevent them working > around user-disabled <a ping>. But in both cases we can and should (IMO) > provide a simple means for the user to express a wish about tracking. > Respectable sites will interoperate nicely with it; those that decide to > circumvent it should be publicly shamed. Using DNT is a flawed comparison, DNT is very much only about letting websites know without the ability to prevent any of that tracking. Websites can't tell whether <a ping> is enabled and thus there is no real point in shaming any of them when we can't even prove they're not using <a ping> because some users might have turned it off. - Tim _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
