Tracking the do not track amendment
Fallout from a milestone decision at the FTC fizzled fears in the online community today, in a hearing that addressed the benefits and consequences of enacting a “do not track” option in web browsers. Amongst some of the benefits: the ability to access certain free sites and the ability to enable some pretty cool technology. But what did the decision really boil down to? It really means the FTC thought enforcing a “do not track” amendment through the development of plugins was essentially “too hard“. Excuse me?
Let’s ponder on this…
Development of plugins in browsers that enable users to opt out of tracking must be extremely difficult, or else plugins might already exist that do just that, right? Right, so we don’t currently have these plugins (but really we do), so we should probably just give up on that.
What are some alternatives?
What if some forward-looking web developers developed an option that gave website visitors and customers the option to opt out? Well, that would introduce a huge problem as well. In order to provide website visitors the ability to opt out of tracking, they would essentially have to track that the user didn’t want to be tracked. What if the user didn’t want a company to track that they opted out of tracking, would everyone be treated as an anonymous (and therefore unique) visitor every time?
So, what you’re saying is that’s also not a valid alternative…
What if web developers found a way to disable a client’s JavaScript support? Would that be scary, or would that be appreciated by conspiracy theorists? Would it even matter? If someone’s wearing a tin foil hat, my odds are on the fact that they do not access the internet, ever. Oh shoot, did you say that large analytics vendors have noscript tags that can track without JS? There goes that idea…
So where does that leave us?
Developing a plugin is clearly way too hard, we can’t track a user’s preference not to track and we can’t disable JavaScript on behalf of someone else, so I guess we’ll just have to live with tracking.
Note: this post is rife with satire and sarcasm and should not be read as in any way serious.
