Emphasis on "websites they do not visit" directly, meaning that it only applies to iframes, popups, etc. If you typed it in the address bar, or clicked on a link to get there, the site isn't limited by DNT.

This is not legal advice.

As part of its functionality it relies on the ability to uniquely identify a user across sites (to provide user authentication).

There are quite a few other services that work in a similar way.

On the other hand, if I'm not logged in, I don't want them tracking me across all the Disqus-enabled sites I visit.

As a user, I want to be stay logged in to Facebook when posting a TC comment. But I don't want Facebook to track me when I visit some random site with a like button. How do we draw the line here?

This is made easier for me by the fact that I don't use Facebook.

[1] https://easylist.adblockplus.org/en/

[2] https://secure.fanboy.co.nz/

So Facebook & Google are fine, too then. You authenticate with them, then they add features based on that.

In the case of facebook they can show the "like" button, but they cant use the information that it has been shown for you on a particular site, on a particular date/time.

Facebook's entire purpose is to show you things you are interested in. The fact you didn't like something on a given site is nearly as useful as if you did.

Facebook show's me updates from my friends activity. It can better match those to my interests if it knows what I am interested in.

Seems that it's like P3P[0], in that it causes problems for developers but in no way keeps a company from asserting things that they don't actually follow, and there's no way to verify that they are.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P

WTF? So analytics packages will somehow have to exclude these browsers from all reports? Some reports? Can you count impressions from these users?

A hypothetical and largely incorrect real-life analogy: you can use cameras to recognize regular clients and keep statistics on them, but you cannot send the camera images to another company to have them processed, because your clients are visiting your store, and not that other company. (This analogy is largely incorrect because camera images are more privacy-sensitive than cookies, and different legal and moral issues are involved, but there's still a similarity.)

Now then again DNT is an intent, the vendor does whatever he likes, and can support DNT for other features and still have statistics. There's no list of things you can do or not do. There's no agreement either. It's just the user indicating that they don't want to be tracked in any way.

Consider a real world equivalent. Suppose you walk into a bookstore and buy a book with cash. The store might not be able to track you individually but they can track how many people visited, how many books they sold, etc. You can't say that's not legitimate.

So I could see an argument that the line that should be drawn is one that involved tracking cookies, but that is quite a narrow exclusion regarding statistics of individual users. You can still get pretty good stuff from the access log and there's no case to be made that DNT means Do Not Log.

Then again anyone is free to track/not track, stat/not stat (so far at least) and only "not track" subset of their data (as long as they don't lie)

Then again there's a few privacy-aware websites who do logging and some stats but on pseudonymized IPs which is also a pretty decent compromise.

I am confused as to how this works for statistics purposes.

advertising existed before every move you made was tracked, and it was quite profitable. There is zero reason that such invasive bullshit is a requirement.

HN user fauigerzigerk put it best:

    I would like to agree with your idea of tracking 
    as payment, but I really can't, because:

    a) Most of the time I don't have a choice. There's 
    no option to pay them money and even if I pay them
    directly, they may still keep collecting tons of
    personal information about me on top of it.

    b) It's sneaky. I don't really know what 
    information they have and how they use it. I just 
    have a couple of completely meaningless words 
    from their privacy policy.

    c) I don't know the price I'm paying.

    The last point is the most important one. 
    The value and the risk associated with a 
    particular piece of information greatly depends 
    on what other information it is combined with, 
    but I can't control that. The company could get   
    acquired tomorrow by some ad behemoth that knows 
    a lot of other things about me, so the price I'm 
    paying could change after the fact. That's not 
    the way payment works. I have to know the price 
    I'm agreeing to pay before I enter that contract.

If your point is strong you should have no need to throw your hands up in the air and say "end of discussion" which is what period pretty much means. Your making the call that this discussion is over because you know best.

I had to post this, your 'period' distracted your entire argument for me.

The thing is, in the offline world, you can control much better who's tracking you. And this is why people get upset at CCTV cameras too; while you can see the people around you who are observing you, and choose to modify you're behavior by whether someone's around or who is around, CCTV means that you may be observed, recorded, and tracked at any time without consent.

"If we don't alllow web advertising to be unregulated, all good content will be paywalled."

You mean that kind of irrational fearmongering?

Because there is ample evidence that good content was available through the internet and later the web, before it was permitted to be used as a commercial vehicle and long before the web became laden with cheap advertising.

OK, thanks.