I always thought the point of DNT wasn’t technical, but to make it impossible to argue either (a) that users don’t really care (many opted in), or (b) that Google et al respect user’s wishes without regulation or technical barriers (they are aware of DNT and its specific meaning and they ignore it). In other words, political maneuvering towards getting the entire industry to accept implementing that technical solution.

The ultimate irony of DNT was that trackers could use the header as browser fingerprinting data..

Well, it only adds one bit of information, that is probably highly correlated with everything else being unique as well :)

True, but is DNT the lesser evil compared to what we have now, which is only annoyance and effectively no control.

Well, if you're going to lobby for a change to the law then you might as well lobby for a change that's actually a good one, instead of a half-baked one that barely works.

I would say it depends on how good any alternative solution is and how realistic it is to pass.

Edit: Having read your blog post, I want to say that I'm not necessarily asking for the original definition of DNT to be reused. What I want is for the DNT header to have the same effect as if I had said no to all optional categories of cookies.

The status quo is that we are asked a "yes or manage" question where "manage" means something horribly complicated that no one does. If we redefine DNT to mean "no to everything optional" then it becomes a matter of local law to define what is and isn't optional. This allows for the sort of minimum level of consumer protection that you're asking for.

The law could also require that this DNT header is opt-out. A per-site overridable DT header if you will.

I'm not going to claim that I have thought this through properly. It's just something that I wish Mozilla did some work on.

I just block traffic with the RFC3514 evil bit set at my firewall.