Do Not Track Does Not Conquer

At times it can seem like protecting one's online privacy is a Sisyphean struggle. Even when the software industry listens to the concerns of privacy advocates, the site owners and secretive data-collectors who profit from pillaging private information are quick to find every loophole and work-around in existence to regain their access to profitable data. Such seems to be the case with the Do Not Track HTTP header (DNT), which has garnered support from browser vendors — plus a steady stream of assaults aimed at undermining it, courtesy of advertisers.

Preferences, browsers, and intent

Although "opt out" mechanisms for web tracking have been discussed for years, the DNT HTTP header approach was first proposed by Mozilla's Mike Shaver. It has subsequently been developed under the stewardship of the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Tracking Protection Working Group. According to the latest draft of the specification, DNT is an optional HTTP header field that can take either 0 or 1 as a value, where 1 indicates that the user prefers not to be tracked, and 0 indicates that the user prefers to allow tracking. The key issue, however, is that the header is intended to represent a user preference — which most interpret to mean a conscious choice on the user's part — and it must not be sent at all if the user has not expressed such a preference to the browser.

Initially Mozilla was the only browser vendor behind DNT, but Opera added support in July in Opera 12, as did Apple a few weeks later in Safari 6. Google added support in Chromium on September 13. In all four browsers, the DNT setting must be manually enabled in the application preferences. Mozilla contended from quite early on that this is a critical facet of making DNT a workable solution. If DNT were enabled automatically or by default, it would no longer represent "a choice made by the person behind the keyboard", but one made by the browser vendor.

The decision was controversial — after all, reasoned critics, who in their right mind wants to be tracked? But Mozilla stood firm, and eventually the other browser makers followed suit. Until June 2012, that is, when Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer (IE) 10 (which is scheduled to ship with Windows 8) would present the DNT option as a check-box shown to the user during installation, with the do-not-track option selected by default.

But enabling DNT by default violates the specification, opponents argued, and strips it of its meaning. And if the DNT header does not reflect an actual user's decision, the argument goes, advertisers will be justified in ignoring it. Apache's Roy Fielding objected strongly enough that he committed a change that causes the web server to un-set the DNT header when it is sent by IE 10. Fielding is a member of the W3C Tracking Protection Working Group, and his log message for the commit said that "Apache does not tolerate deliberate abuse of open standards". He elaborated on that interpretation in the inevitable argument that followed on GitHub, calling Microsoft's decision broken because it violates the specification's requirement that the DNT header default to "unset." Apache, he said, "has no particular interest in what goes in the open standard -- only in that the protocol means what the WG says it means when the extra eight bytes are sent on the wire."

Conspiracy theorists might suspect that Microsoft's decision is a subtle ploy to undermine DNT entirely to curry favor with advertisers and other user-tracking firms. If so, the advertising world is doing an excellent job of maintaining a cover story; the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) publicly criticized the decision in an open letter to Microsoft management.

Step right up

Regardless of what happens on the browser and server fronts, DNT still relies on voluntary compliance on behalf of site administrators and service providers — and, by extension, compliance that matches up with what the user intends. The meaning of DNT might seem to be straightforward, but the people who make their money tracking users cannot be forced to agree. In September, Ed Bott at ZDNet reported that the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) "devised their own interpretation" of DNT, under which they would continue to collect information, but would refrain from using that information to deliver targeted ads to the browser. Presumably that restraint lasts only for the duration of the browsing session in which DNT is sent.

Lest anyone propose a "Do Not Target Ads" HTTP header that IAB and DAA might conversely interpret as a reason to stop collecting tracking information, remember that nothing obligates advertisers or other information brokers to react to the header at all. Grant Gross at IDG said at least one site, a "tech-focused think tank" called the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), has unilaterally decided it will simply ignore the DNT header, and its site will report that fact to visitors.

Other members of the advertising business have embarked on their own campaigns to nip DNT in the bud. In June, the US Senate held hearings about tracking and DNT in particular. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) observed, ANA representative Bob Liodice testified at the hearings that DNT would undermine cybersecurity, including "issues such as online sexual predators and identity theft". The Senate did not seem to buy Liodice's argument (Senator Jay Rockefeller, chairman of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, declared the cybersecurity argument "a total red herring"), although the EFF noted that online tracking does raise important law enforcement questions in addition to its advertising angle.

Most recently, DNT critics gathered at the W3C Tracking Protection Working Group meeting in Amsterdam, where the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) proposed that an exception be added to the DNT specification for "marketing." The EFF blog entry about the meeting quotes the DMA representative as saying:

Such an "exception" would seem to cover the precise tracking scenario for which DNT is designed, and indeed other members of the working group fought back. Fielding accused DMA of "raising issues that you know quite well will not be adopted". The EFF views DMA's participation in the meeting as an attempt to undermine or derail the specification-writing process. That is a bit of a judgment call, but it is clear from the latest traffic on the working group's mailing list that DMA, DAA, and other advertising groups are not meshing well with the software industry representatives who typically account for the bulk of W3C participation. In recent weeks there have been multiple threads about redefining basic terms like "service provider" and "user agent" that indicate (at the very least) a culture clash.

On the plus side, there have been sites and web services that have voluntarily announced their intention to comply with DNT; Twitter is the highest-profile. But the specification is far from completion, and as recent events show, voluntary compliance will only take care of a subset of the data-collecting entities on the web today. In the GitHub comment linked to above, Fielding speculated that the long-term ploy of DNT advocates was to get widespread adoption, then to push for mandatory compliance through legislation. Whether that will happen is anyone's guess; the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has endorsed DNT, which in addition to the US Senate hearings might provide enough evidence to make the advertising industry wary.

Implementing a campaign of "good enough for most" self-regulation would be one path to avoiding such government oversight, and derailing or gutting the specification could be effective, too. At the moment, the advertising business seems to be pursuing both tactics. It is up to the W3C and privacy advocates to respond, but at least for the time being the only guaranteed way for users to safeguard their privacy remains the do-it-yourself approach: Tor, NoScript, Adblock Plus, and so on. A world where user-tracking is simply not an issue sounds nice — it just doesn't sound likely in the near-term.