Tangentially: this would be a good thing to explain to software developers. For example that it is not okay to spy on us just because we used their software for some other purpose. Their excuses sound quite like the “social libertarian” arguments: “Hey, you never technically prevented me from tracking you across half of the internet and compiling a huge detailed dossier on your internet behavior… so I just did that, and if you don’t like it, it’s your fault for not protecting your privacy better.” (Hi, Google and Facebook!)
Today I got really mad at Firefox, because the newest version again started displaying the most frequently visited websites on a new tab. Of course you can’t just simply disable this behavior in the options dialog; you have to read the documentation and find out which value in configuration needs to be changed. While reading the documentation, I found that “Do Not Track” is disabled by default; you need to enable it manually, but in order to do that, you need to know that such thing exists in the first place. Does it mean that all people who are insufficiently computer literate to know what “Do Not Track” means actually consent to tracking? According to Firefox, apparently yes. Then I found something about “prefetching” pages, and...
...then I just snapped. Why the **** do I need to read the whole Firefox documentation in order to find all those violations of privacy that I never consented to in the first place? Why can’t “do not be a creepy stalker, and do not cooperate with stalkers behind my back” simply be the default option for a web browser? (Or at least, ask “Do you want to give up your privacy for no good reason: Yes or No?” at installation.) I want the web browser to show me the web pages that I want to see. I did not ask anyone to compile my web history and display it on the monitor whenever I open a new tab. I do not want to notify Google or Facebook whenever I visit a page containing their ads or buttons that “yes, this is the same person who is registered at your website as X.Y.” And I do not want to study extensively the web browser documentation whenever I want to opt out of any of this; and possibly do it again when a new version of the software is published. (And what about all those non-IT people who even do not have this option?)
So, this is my first LW comment written on Brave, which claims to be better in this aspect. I hope this is not too much off-topic.
Does it mean that all people who are insufficiently computer literate to know what “Do Not Track” means actually consent to tracking?
The idea of “Do Not Track” is that websites should give people content for free and they shouldn’t be able to count how much of which articles the give out for free.
Calling the idea that free websites want to know something about their audience to optimize themselves “no good reason” is
I do not want to notify Google or Facebook whenever I visit a page containing their ads or buttons that “yes, this is the same person who is registered at your website as X.Y.”
This has nothing directly to do with whether or not “Do Not Track” is send but with whether or not the browser has cookies.
“Do Not Track” is the idea that your browser should notify the server that the server doesn’t use the data to which it has access to “track” you. Tracking then can mean a lot of things like Piwik counting visitor counts to specific subpages.
Tools like Optimizely that run A/B tests are also supposed to be tracking users and there are post that argue they should ignore users that send “Do Not Track”.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with Lesserwrong running Google Analytics and likely with the default configuration that does track visitor counts for subpages.
In addition you are getting Firefox for free, so someone else has to pay for it and that there aren’t that many ways besides making deals with companies like Google to pay for it.
Tangentially: this would be a good thing to explain to software developers. For example that it is not okay to spy on us just because we used their software for some other purpose. Their excuses sound quite like the “social libertarian” arguments: “Hey, you never technically prevented me from tracking you across half of the internet and compiling a huge detailed dossier on your internet behavior… so I just did that, and if you don’t like it, it’s your fault for not protecting your privacy better.” (Hi, Google and Facebook!)
Today I got really mad at Firefox, because the newest version again started displaying the most frequently visited websites on a new tab. Of course you can’t just simply disable this behavior in the options dialog; you have to read the documentation and find out which value in configuration needs to be changed. While reading the documentation, I found that “Do Not Track” is disabled by default; you need to enable it manually, but in order to do that, you need to know that such thing exists in the first place. Does it mean that all people who are insufficiently computer literate to know what “Do Not Track” means actually consent to tracking? According to Firefox, apparently yes. Then I found something about “prefetching” pages, and...
...then I just snapped. Why the **** do I need to read the whole Firefox documentation in order to find all those violations of privacy that I never consented to in the first place? Why can’t “do not be a creepy stalker, and do not cooperate with stalkers behind my back” simply be the default option for a web browser? (Or at least, ask “Do you want to give up your privacy for no good reason: Yes or No?” at installation.) I want the web browser to show me the web pages that I want to see. I did not ask anyone to compile my web history and display it on the monitor whenever I open a new tab. I do not want to notify Google or Facebook whenever I visit a page containing their ads or buttons that “yes, this is the same person who is registered at your website as X.Y.” And I do not want to study extensively the web browser documentation whenever I want to opt out of any of this; and possibly do it again when a new version of the software is published. (And what about all those non-IT people who even do not have this option?)
So, this is my first LW comment written on Brave, which claims to be better in this aspect. I hope this is not too much off-topic.
The idea of “Do Not Track” is that websites should give people content for free and they shouldn’t be able to count how much of which articles the give out for free.
Calling the idea that free websites want to know something about their audience to optimize themselves “no good reason” is
This has nothing directly to do with whether or not “Do Not Track” is send but with whether or not the browser has cookies.
“Do Not Track” is the idea that your browser should notify the server that the server doesn’t use the data to which it has access to “track” you. Tracking then can mean a lot of things like Piwik counting visitor counts to specific subpages.
Tools like Optimizely that run A/B tests are also supposed to be tracking users and there are post that argue they should ignore users that send “Do Not Track”.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with Lesserwrong running Google Analytics and likely with the default configuration that does track visitor counts for subpages.
In addition you are getting Firefox for free, so someone else has to pay for it and that there aren’t that many ways besides making deals with companies like Google to pay for it.