The myth of Do Not Track — and the tragedy of Internet privacy

I’ll start today’s post with a fairy tale: Long, long ago in a land far, far away, there lived two tribes. One, called the Privagoths, kept largely to themselves. They rarely ventured out beyond the confines of their ancestral lands. They did not mingle with other tribes; they just wanted to be left alone.

Another, known as the Advotati, were exactly the opposite. They were constantly invading Privagoth territory, watching to see where they hunted, what they caught, which nuts and berries they liked best, then making suggestions as to what the Privagoths should do next. All they asked for in return was a small percentage of whatever the Privagoths took.

[ Cringely weighs in on high-tech heroes and zeros: 2013’s best and worst so far. | For a humorous take on the tech industry’s shenanigans, subscribe to Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter and follow Cringely on Twitter. | Get the latest insight on the tech news that matters from InfoWorld’s Tech Watch blog. ]

The Privagoths did not much like that the Advotati were watching their every move. They got very agitated. In turn, the Advotati insisted that without their help the Privagoths’ hunting and gathering would be much less fruitful, and they’d have to roam further and longer to keep themselves fed. They might even starve.

Both tribes were on the verge of war when wise old King Liebowitz of the Intertribal Trade Commission insisted both sides sit down on the same log and work out their differences. Surely, King Liebowitz said, they could figure out a way so that those Privagoths who wished to follow the Advotati’s suggestions could still do so, while others could hunt and gather without someone watching them all the time.

In the centuries since then, this is all the two tribes have been doing: sitting on the same damned log, arguing over nuts and berries. Meanwhile, the Privagoths continue to hunt, with the Advotati following closely behind.

All tracking, no action

Why am I going on like an episode of “Fractured Fairy Tales” on hallucinogens? Because I’m actually describing the battle over Do Not Track, which has been raging for the last five years, if not longer, with no end in sight.

The World Wide Web Consortium’s Tracking Protection Working Group, which was established in the fall of 2010 following a mandate from the FTC, was to officially end its process today, July 31.

Of course, the W3C TPWG was also supposed to officially end its process in January 2012, April 2012, and October 2012. Now, according to today’s version of the group’s website, the new end date is April 30, 2014.

Last night, perhaps the best-known privacy advocate involved in this process — certainly the one who has been most publically skeptical of the other sides’ motives — said enough was enough and tendered his resignation. In his note, Stanford doctoral candidate Jonathan Mayer wrote:

We first met to discuss Do Not Track over 2 years ago. We have now held 10 in-person meetings and 78 conference calls. We have exchanged 7,148 emails. And those boggling figures reflect just the official fora.

The group remains at an impasse. We have sharpened issues, and we have made some progress on low-hanging fruit. But we still have not resolved our longstanding key disagreements, including: What information can websites collect, retain, and use? What sorts of user interfaces and defaults are compliant, and can websites ignore noncompliant browsers?…

We have reached the end of July. There is no light at the end of the tunnel. A glance at our issue tracker confirms scant progress…. Given the lack of a viable path to consensus, I can no longer justify the substantial time, travel, and effort associated with continuing in the Working Group.

Mayer is also one of the main forces behind Mozilla deciding to make Do Not Track a default setting in an upcoming version of the Firefox browser — in large part because he lost any faith that the working group would come up with a fair DNT solution. He’s not the only one calling for that group to fish or cut bait.

To be fair, the lack of resolution isn’t the result of laziness. I’ve been lurking on the email lists for the W3CTPG for the past four months, and I have to say I’m impressed with the effort and dedication of all involved. But the issues are more complicated than you might expect, and when you have dozens of geeks who can’t agree on the meaning of basic terms (such as “tracking” and “browser”), it’s a recipe for stalemate.

A lopsided battle

And — let’s be honest here — one side has no real incentive to bargain. The only reason the advertising/tracking industry is participating in this process is to avoid the threat of legislation mandating Do Not Track as a default setting. But with the odds of our Congressional clown college passing any kind of legislation next to nil, there’s not a lot of motivation for the Advotati to move away from the notion that tracking should be the default setting for everyone and everything.

As the debate over Do Not Track was raging, the ad industry created a trade group called the Digital Advertising Alliance, which in turn created a “self regulatory” system designed to head DNT off at the pass. It’s called the Ad Choices program, and it’s really designed to look like it’s giving control over ad tracking to consumers, without actually giving control over ad tracking to consumers.

You’ve probably seen it in action — those tiny blue triangles that appear at the corners of some behavioral ads, which give you more information about the advertisers when you click on them. Allegedly, you can opt out of all behavioral ads with a single click inside the Ad Choices window; in reality, opting out will take some 300 to 500 clicks for every browser on every device you use — and that doesn’t cover a lot of companies that deposit tracking cookies on your computer.

That is the current state of the Internet; barring a mass adoption of tracking blockers like Abine’s DoNotTrackMe or Disconnect browser plug-ins, that’s how it will remain. The longer this fight over DNT goes on, the more information the advertisers and their data mining buddies collect. The real issue isn’t even the “more relevant” ads that anonymous behaviorial tracking allows; it’s how that data can be tied back to your actual identity, and what else it could be used for — like loan approvals or determining insurance rates.

The working group might eventually plod its way toward some kind of DNT standard, but it will probably be too little and too late. With every day that passes, it seems less likely that this fairy tale will have a happy ending.

Is there a Goldilocks solution for Web tracking? Or are we stuck with the big bad wolf? Submit the moral of this story below or email me: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, “The myth of Do Not Track — and the tragedy of Internet privacy,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, follow Cringely on Twitter, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.