[note: this article was written by an executive at Microsoft’s
Ad Business Group]
Interesting.
Microsoft announced that the new IE will ship with a feature called DNT
(“Do Not Track”), which will alert websites when users don’t want to be tracked
--unless the user chooses to do so.
Obviously, advertisers are up in arms about this, claiming that
Microsoft is anti-advertising.
Consumers are more aware than ever that they are being
watched and their patterns of web behavior provide fodder for advertisers to
reach them. Microsoft comes out looking altruistic, spouting blurbs about
respecting the consumer’s right to “choice and control” and educating each one
about participating in the “value exchange” of info to support the user
experience and how you can choose to help build a “beautiful advertising
experience” for yourself as we all enter the age of “digital enlightenment”.
While I agree with Microsoft's action, does this strike anyone else
as (ironically) an advertisement and ploy to get consumers to choose IE over
Mozilla and Chrome and help Microsoft secure its position in the browser wars?
http://www.zdnet.com/why-do-not-track-is-worse-than-a-miserable-failure-7000004634/ via http://slashdot.org
ReplyDeleteFollow up on IE 10 and DNT. Apache (a very popular web server) is ignoring the DNT flag entirely.
This article also discusses what DNT is being interpreted as by the advertisers. At the end of the day advertisers are continuing to collect data on your behavior but not taking action on it.
Some might say that is disingenuous, however I would liken it to passive observation. No one would object to counting the number of people that pass by an intersection (this is called foot fall and is a critical metric for outdoor advertising). At the end of the day, collecting and aggregating anonymized data is not scary to me.
Who's scared of the big bad data collectors?
If you ask people the question of tracking, they will err on the conservative/risk-averse/big brother side and say "no way." But the reality is if you demonstrate tangible value people have no problem whatsoever.
ReplyDeleteI don't see that as driving browser decision-making for anyone other than my Mom and her set - and she likely has IE already as her default.