Do Not Track was an attempt to give users a voice and the overwhelming response to it by the trackers was to ignore it. DoNotTrack wasn't an effective anti-tracking solution, but for every opt-in, it was a clear message from users. It's why Microsoft's auto-opt in, while probably well meaning, really screwed the whole thing. It had to be a choice.

It was a message, and it's still a very strong argument when it comes to the discussion about dishonesty among trackers and advertising networks.

I might be overly cynical, but I think that was pure covert corporate warfare on Microsoft's part: it could reduce Google's income and was good PR.

On the contrary, it was (generally) those in favor of government-mandated privacy and security who heavily supported the DNT efforts. The "Ayn Rand fanboys" just told people to install uBlock Origin

At least that's what parent's claim was, which you seem to disagree with but failed to actually argue against.

I keep seeing this recently and this time I can't even imagine how it could be relevant.

Some people live in a political/cultural "tribe", and see the entire world through a prism where everything they dislike is linked to "the other tribe". They often punctuate every paragraph with some meme jab at the other tribe, even if it's seemingly irrelevant for everyone else who doesn't share the same prism.

On Reddit, this results in imaginary Internet points (i.e. upvotes), which reinforces the behavior and the underlying mindset. The HN community is better, but still not immune to this. I'm convinced that the "gamification" of online discussion over the past ten years has pretty deep impacts that future generations will look back on someday.

My gamer and geek friends have been spewing libertarian flavored Randian nonsense since middle school, circa 1983. I never imagined that worldview would prevail. It was just so puerile. Not so different than the tortured coming of age fantasies embraced by the other subcultures (stoners, metalheads, preppies). Though maybe the nerds were more aggrieved, seeing themselves as an oppressed minority.

Of course, none of us knew about the well funded propaganda machine pushing the whole Austrian/Chicago school of economics. Young Republicans, trickle-down economics, John Birch Society, Hertitage Foundation, disaster capitalism, Grover Norquist, etc.

Edit: TL;DR: Mockery is the only appropriate response.

During the aughts, I attended many of our local political parties. Socialists, Dems, GOP, Libertarians, etc.

All these cliques, for lack of a better word, are mostly defined by what they're not (in opposition to other cliques).

The exception was our local Green Party. Their members were defined affirmatively, by what they stood for, vs in opposition to some other group.

The Libertarians were especially mushy in their supposedly beliefs, and no two agreed on anything other than everyone else was wrong. Kinda like the various Christian sects.

You could add in the Mont Pelerin Society,Foundation for Economic Freedom, Atlas Network, and Cato Institute, Mercatus Center, Adam Smith Institute, Mercatus Center.

And personnel: Ludwig von Mises, Leonard Read, Murray Rothbard, Friedrich Hayek, the Kochs (Fred, Charles, David), for completeness.

Mark Ames has an excellent general summary: http://www.alternet.org/visions/true-history-libertarianism-...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Pelerin_Society

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Network

https://www.atlasnetwork.org/partners/global-directory

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_for_Economic_Educ...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato_Institute

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercatus_Center

See, e.g., Philip Mirowski's The Road From Mont Pelerin:

http://www.worldcat.org/title/road-from-mont-pelerin-the-mak...

I recently read a magazine article that covers same history as Mirowski's book. Hayek's motivations and strategy for pushing his ideas (take over economics depts in higher ed) are fascinating, instructive. Sadly, I can't imagine how the left could replicate that effort for reality-based polcies.

On mobile, sorry no link handy. I'll edit if I can find it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_F._Powell_Jr.#Powell_M...

I'm not immediately recalling or coming up with a Hayek reference, though it wouldn't surprise me in the least, and I'd very much like to see what you're thinking of if you can find it.

At least someone on the Internet recognizes the Mercatus Center for the Koch propaganda machine that they are. It's unfortunate, the influence they have on the GMU graduates.

I've been re-reading John Henry Newman's Apologia pro Vita Sua, published in 1864, describing the author's conversion from the Church of England (where he was one of the most visible clergymen of the time) to Roman Catholicism. It was written in response to another clergyman making accusations that, not only was Newman being dishonest, that dishonesty was an inherent characteristic of Catholics, and that (based on an uncharitable reading of Alphonsus Liguori) it was Catholic doctrine that Catholics could lie about anything to preserve their faith, and therefore Newman had been a Catholic sleeper agent his whole life, tricking his fellow conservative Anglicans into adopting papist positions until he was ready to reveal himself as a Catholic to convince others to jump ship.

He sets out his response in the introduction, and in it he introduces the term "poisoning the well" to name a logical fallacy: he asserts that his ideological opponent has made it impossible for him to say anything in self-defense, and hopes his readers will recognize it.

This all strikes me as extremely reminiscent of Internet arguments. The uncharitable clergyman is very tribal, and defecting from the Anglican tribe to the Roman Catholic one is an unforgivable offense. And Newman responds by saying, look, you have used a logical fallacy against me. They'd fit so well on Slashdot! But it was over 100 years before the Internet.

(On a side note, the phrase "imaginary Internet points" to describe upvotes strikes me as a thought-killing meme jab itself. The descriptor "imaginary" makes no sense: what would real Internet points look like?)

In this case, it sounds like it's mocking the idea that the market-based voluntary agreements could solve this problem. Lots of people seem to think you can solve any problem by just "letting the market work."

I fully expect we'll look back on Internet advertising as a bootstrapper for the early Internet economy as opposed to a lasting model.

Of course at some point there might be ad-blocker-blocker-blockers which will postpone the problem to another round. But do we really want an economy based on an arms race?

An ad-blocker-blocker-blocker is just an ad-blocker.

An ad-blocker removes ads.

An ad-blocker-blocker detects ad-blockers and refuses to serve content if one is detected. (Instead a "disable your ad-blocker if you want to use this site" message is shown)

An ad-blocker-blocker-blocker masks the ad-blocker against detection, so content can still be consumed.

Etc...

https://www.salon.com/2016/12/14/fountainhead-of-bad-ideas-a...

Make your own conclusions.

I seriously doubt that Donald Trump is really a fan of Ayn Rand. Her books may be juvenile and shallow, but they’re way too deep for him.

Make your own conclusions, indeed.

Heather Digby Parton, also known as "Digby," is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.

Um, I only hope they don't give awards for that.

It's glorified trash talking really.

This was probably the best response of all because it provides a plausible explanation why this started only recently. I mean, I swear I have never seen Rand mentioned on HN by anyone in any way until lots of people suddenly started making fun of her few weeks ago.

No, a group of people have been posting about Rand for years. Here's a thread from 8 years ago people on both sides of the like/dislike divide. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=427292

Here's a post with over 40 points that's just a quote from Atlas Shrugged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5860250#5860696

I'm not saying that it never happened but that it wasn't the case that she was mentioned in every other flamewar about politics.

From hn.algolia.com, excerpts from all "Ayn Rand" posts in the last 10 days, except replies to these posts:

Was there ever a honest belief by anyone (except the Ayn Rand fanboys) this could work?

Yeah, that would be great in the Ayn Rand's fantasy land

I had a coworker who was a hardcore Ayn Rand type who had a real harsh point of view like this, until his infant was born with a congenital heart defect that resulted in hospitalization for 3-4 months. [this one actually isn't dumb]

HN is nothing but startup bros, armchair economists, and card-carrying Ayn Rand fan club members.

For an entire generation community-oriented principles, egalitarianism, collectivist ideas, and far-left leaders were demonized as Soviet sympathizers, replaced with rah rah unregulated capitalism, Ayn Rand-ian individualist, and military might. [tl;dr, might be reasonable]

Nobody cares about your Ayn Rand pablum anymore. Argue on morals that have any grounding at all in the real world.

If you now mandated them to respect some special HTTP header instead, most of them would simply 403 all browsers with this header set and you would have to disable it to access these sites. So same thing as with JavaScript and cookies - either tolerate crap or stop using a dozen websites or install yet another extension for management of per-site exceptions.

This law is silly and completely detached from reality. They should either prohibit tracking by law or do nothing.

A number of websites formulate this as "By continuing to use this website, you agree that we will access your cookies," accompanied with a "Dismiss" button, but that's not really what the spirit of the law is.

DNT didn't change anything to this, as it was meant for a completely different use. I'd even say using DNT for this is a complete hack, which sort of misses the point of both the cookie law and DNT. You are, however, completely right that it is stupid beyond ridicule that you technically can't store the fact that a user doesn't want cookies on the browser.

Edit: paragraph formatting.

Yes you can, it's pretty simple to do. Add a timestamped entry into your database to not show that notification to the IP address the user comes from, then run a script every minute that clears out entries older than an hour. Granted, if you go back to the website an hour later, it would still pop up the request to access cookies but it certainly beats having it pop up on every page load.

[1]: http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/basics/legal/cookies/index_en.htm#se...

How about a browser extension that hides any overlay divs with the string 'cookies' and input buttons?

It is trash, but at least it is something.

Compelling arguments in favor.

5%? Nah, I'll pass; I don't want to spend my last six months in agony, so it's not worth it (i.e., bad trade-off). 95%? Hell yes, sign me up. Your own analogy supports what I said earlier.

On a side note, the statement "Chemotherapy will probably cure your cancer" is also not true and shows a bit of ignorance re cancer therapies in general.

Google might listen to DNT, or it might ignore DNT, but I don't think they'd ever pretend to listen to DNT and then do something different. They'd get sued for sure.

Can I or a neutral third party audit your internal database to verify that my browsing history is not being recorded by you? Do you provide a list of all third parties with which you share information with so I can attempt to audit them as well?

What dispute resolution procedures do you support if I have reason to believe that you do, in fact, hold some of my personal information despite my express request? How would you respond to a request to purge an individual's records from your logs?

--------------------------------------------------------

I don't mean to put you, personally, on the spot. I'm sure your firm is perfectly ethical, and that you do listen for and take some action to honor DNT requests as far as you see fit. I'm also sure that were I at an advertising firm I wouldn't have any better policies. It's not your fault this is a stupid feature.

That said, to almost anyone outside the webdev community "Do Not Track" doesn't mean, "Track, but Anonymize" or "Track, but Don't Personalize", it means "Don't Create A Record I Was Here". I've yet to run across a single company, advertising or otherwise, that interprets it that way, though.

I'd bet nobody respects dnt like that, but you can still check. Obviously if they want to be shady they can get around this too.

However, I'm more concerned about the hundreds of other services that might not. My point was that DNT requires cooperation from a huge number of actors to be effective, with the actors having no incentive to play along and nothing to fear if they don't.

His comment in no way responds to the main argument, here, which is that there exist many scummy companies who ignore DNT.