| The ad industry, more than 2 years ago, said they would treat the DNT signal as a "de-identify" signal for serving specific ads on a specific site if they got that signal, but continue to collect data on us wherever they could and the stalking companies would continue to aggregate data from those visits with everything else (mobile data, location, web surfing on larger machines, sunday school transcripts, etc).
This isn't new..they are just using the new stats to justify something they've already been doing since DNT started to come out in alpha more than 2y ago.
There was user research a couple of years ago (by Aleecia McDonald among others), about what regular people thought DNT would do when they selected it, and the belief was that DNT meant that no data was collected. The browser makers agreed with the users, but cannot stop the beacons and fingerprinting and the aggregation on the other side at the web server about that user. The browser makes can just serve the DNT signal to the page / ad widgets / beacons and depending on the browser, try not to share the history or other cookies in the user's machine, however, I believe that attempts not to share haven't worked because there is no real security around history and cookies. The ad and web servers treat DNT as "don't grab personal data from aggregators to select the ad" but do collect and aggregate all data you can on that user / machine and pass it back to the stalker/aggregators.
It's a terrible mismatch of intentions and understandings, and Liz, you are correct, that user's feel betrayed and it does create more chaos.
mary
On Jul 8, 2013, at 10:59 AM, Liz Coker wrote:
Yes. Had read this. As you can see in this article, if you push the ad industry they push back. They will simply find another way to preserve their businesses. (the highlights/emphasis below are mine).
"Zaneis says that the high numbers of people with active do-not-track signals means that “it
is no longer tenable” for the ad industry to allow consumers to opt out of online behavioral advertising by setting a do-not-track signal. Instead,
the ad industry appears to be proposing to “de-link” or “de-identify” data about users who activate do-not-track headers. Such measures potentially could make it harder to determine people's names based solely on data about the Web sites they visit, but that
depends on the methods used to “de-identify” the data."
That being said – this approach does not build trust and transparency into anything. It just creates more chaos. If a site detected you were from Narnia, then it could resort to other methods to try to ascertain your 'true
identity". And will users remember to "turn it off" every time they want to transact in VRM mode? Likely not – too much hassle. I'm sure most of us understand why she did this, but, IMO, for VRM to succeed we need a a system based upon accuracy and respect,
not obfuscation.
Liz
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Elizabeth Coker
Vice President, Marketing
3PMobile
Boulder, CO USA
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Improving the Mobile Web Experience
Office: 303.938.1769
Email:
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From: John S James <
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Date: Saturday, July 6, 2013 11:42 PM
To: "T.Rob" <
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Cc: Eaon <
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Subject: Re: [projectvrm] This Student Project Could Kill Digital Ad Targeting - Ad Age Mobile
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