Other than the posts by Bil Corey, the recent discussion on this thread seems to be about the details of the technical implementation. Have we even agreed that this is a good move for the eco system of the web, and especially for people who are privacy sensitive?
If this is implemented (and particularly if the other browser vendors follow Apple/Mozilla's lead) then developers will just switch to using other methods to track users, so in the end it will have zero benefit to privacy. Why suffer the range of problems mentioned in other posts if there's no benefit? It might be possible to convince me that this would be worth enabling for users who have opted out of tracking, but even then I think there are too many downsides. In my opinion it is impossible to prevent a user being tracked from one website to another as there are just too many ways of passing data, each of them serving a useful purpose. If we were to block all of them then the web wouldn't be anything like as powerful as it is today. That's not to say we should give up on privacy, but we should concentrate on the areas where we might succeed: initiatives such as Do Not Track and other more political and educational approaches. You should also not assume that users do not want to be tracked. Millions of people opt-in to having their grocery shopping habits tracked in return for a 1% discount and the occasional money-off coupon. Ian Thomas (thelem) _______________________________________________ dev-privacy mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-privacy
