What you need to know about online advertisers tracking you
Spend lots of time online? Then perhaps you've heard of targeted advertising, "Big Data" analysis and complaints of privacy violations by advertising companies. The ads above your Gmail inbox? Yeah, those. As it turns out, most people don't like being tracked by advertisers. Surprise! As such, a variety of tools exist to protect individuals. But what about a solution that anyone could use, that didn't require knowledge of cryptography or even a software install? That's where the Do Not Track initiative comes in.
Do Not Track (DNT) is explained by its own name: Don't track what I do online, including what I buy, what I read, what I say and who I communicate with. But how should it work? Therein lies the controversy. Since the subject is still being debated, now's the perfect time to learn about it, voice your opinion and request more control over your data. If you want more control, that is.
WHAT IS IT?
The idea of Do Not Track (DNT) was initially conceived in late 2007. Several groups, including the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF),asked the Federal Trade Commission(FTC) to help with the creation of something similar to the National Do Not Call Registry: a system to limit the amount of personally identifiable information a company can obtain without express authorization from an individual. More directly, DNT is a system to protect individuals from advertisers eager for personal info on consumers.
The proposed technology asked for online advertisers to submit web address information to the FTC, which the agency would publish and make accessible to the public. Why a list? So that web browsers (Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, etc.) could effectively block advertiser tracking on a wide scale. The list concept, however, was ultimately flawed: Every time an advertiser changed its web info, the DNT function became obsolete. It would require extreme vigilance to keep the system 100 percent effective. As such, it died.
WHY SHOULD I CARE?
If you don't care that websites and companies monitor your behavior, share what they know about you and generally act creepy about personal information, well, we're impressed you got this far into a piece about Do Not Track. If you don't want Amazon to show you ads about swimsuits, towels and sunblock because you mentioned you were excited about going to the beach on Facebook, you should care.
Not freaked out enough by that example? What if they know your daughter is pregnant before you know? For some people, this isn't a big deal. For others, it's extremely important.
We aren't going to get into the implications of governments knowing everything about you; the Do Not Track initiative is only aimed at advertising companies. However, it's not crazy to think that a government could request all the data an advertising company has in order to collect taxes, or worse: infringe on free-speech rights.
HOW DOES IT WORK?
Modern browsers, such as Firefox, currently send something called "headers" to web servers (computers where websites are hosted). Say you're visiting, I don't know, this website. Say you're on a PC, running Windows 7, and you're using Firefox to read all aboutwhatever happened to Netscape. The server hosting Engadget's content needs to know how to present information (in this case, our website), to your particular setup. So your computer tells our web server how it's set up and in turn, our web server returns a readable website. It also returns ad-tracking software.
The Do Not Track initiative simply adds an additional piece of information (the DNT header) to the initial request, which is set to 0 or 1. If the DNT header equals 1, the web browser knows it should not track the user's behavior on the site, and a company knows not to use that data for advertising purposes.
Engadget
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