Internet users who visit itif.org with Do Not Track enabled...
Internet users who visit itif.org with Do Not Track enabled in their browsers will get a rejection notice from the site, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation said Friday. It’s a ploy to focus users’ attention on the importance of…
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targeted ads -- which is enabled by tracking -- to free content and services online, ITIF’s Daniel Castro said in a blog post (http://xrl.us/bnrs9n). “Heavily promoted” by the FTC, White House and others, Do Not Track is not only a “detrimental policy” but “will be a failure in the long-term,” he said. Along with free news, music, email and other services, mobile applications are “increasingly free” because of targeting, which “for the most part ... is done without revealing the identity of users to the advertisers,” he said. Untargeted ads aren’t as lucrative for advertisers and they won’t pay as much for them, so if a Do Not Track standard is created and users opt out of targeting on a “large scale,” either websites decrease their free or low-cost content and services or fill their pages with more ads, Castro said. Because of “fear-mongering” by privacy advocates, “most users” would enable Do Not Track in their browsers if it were the standard, he predicted. Internet Explorer versions 8 and 9 and Firefox support differing implementations of the feature. But there’s nothing stopping website owners from blocking visitors whose browsers disable targeting, he said: Only if Congress passed a law that required websites to allow no-targeting visitors to access their sites would Do Not Track be “viable.” Such a law is “certainly within the realm of possibility” considering the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act has a similar provision for kids under 13, but “I'm still optimistic that such insanity would not prevail,” Castro said. “If websites preemptively block users who enable Do Not Track, we might avoid getting sucked into this black hole."