It was a double-edged sword. While websites could honor it, it could also be abused as another data point for fingerprinting.
Legalism mentality is cringe, we need solutions that work against criminals who don’t care. When people push for legalist solutions it shows they have no real understanding of how the world actually works and just want to complain about what people should and shouldn’t do.
Shoulds are irrelevant in this world, people do what they want, even if it is illegal, in the digital world where there are way less clues left behind of illegal activity we need solutions that actually do something, like actually blocking those trackers, or feeding false fingerprint data that changes everytime or is exactly the same as other browsers. Not expecting the providers to follow the law, they believe they are above the law until they get caught, then they’ll act apologetic and start doing it again.
Your assumption is based on the idea that these people are not criminals, which is wrong.
Feel free to go to some shithole in the middle East or Africa where there is no rule of law and see how that works out for you.
Your assumption is based on the idea that these people are not criminals, which is wrong.
They are not criminals until they actually break laws. Yes. That’s how rule of law works. That’s why there need to be laws that regulate them. Welcome to the real world.
How are you going to prove that this particular metric was used to fingerprint? That’s the issue I have - you can identify cookies, pixel trackers etc but there’s no way to prove whether a site uses a flag you send anyways. And enforcing something that can’t be proven is really hard - currently, not only the easy rules are enforced.
If it was law to abide to the Do Not Track setting, then a leak about a company dishonoring this would simply face massive fines, which is usually enough encouragement for them to abide.