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)
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