The encouraging promise of a single button that prevents ads from tracking your online behavior is fading away quickly. More than nine months after the Obama administration, digital advertisers, browser makers and privacy advocates agreed in principle to create a "Do Not Track" mechanism for Web browsers, the tool is no closer to becoming a reality than it was back in February. In actuality, the entire plan is on life support as support slowly disappears.
According to various sources, the groups have been sitting around a table every Wednesday trying to reach a consensus on how a Do Not Track button would be implemented. After months of negotiating, the groups still can't even come to an agreement on what "tracking" means and includes. The advertising industry wants to hang on to the current business model of targeted advertising, which is where ads are generated to users based on their browsing activity. Lawmakers and policy advocates believe that people should easily be able to opt out of that. Sadly though, the one thing all sides agree on is that they are hopelessly deadlocked. Privacy advocates accuse the advertising industry of unfairly stalling the process over the last few months. "The advertisers have been extraordinarily obstructionist, raising the same issues over and over again, forcing new issues that were not on the agenda, adding new issues that have been closed, and launching personal attacks," said Jonathan Mayer, a privacy researcher from Stanford and Do Not Track technology developer who is heavily involved in the negotiations.
"We have made, maybe, inches of progress," he said. "This continues to be a stalemate." From the other point of view, the industry claims that privacy supporters are trying to impose overly restrictive changes that could seriously hinder the digital advertising business. "We have a real concern about using a sledgehammer for a flyswatter problem," said Marc Groman, executive director of the National Advertising Initiative, a group of online advertisers. "Do Not Track will have a disproportionate effect on our stakeholders."
The World Wide Web Consortium, more commonly known as the W3C, is moderating this seemingly endless debate. In an effort to blast through the impasse, the W3C hired Peter Swire this week, an Ohio State University law professor and a former privacy official for the Obama and Clinton administrations, as the working group's new chair. W3C's hope is that Swire can quickly build consensus. As of right now, most major browsers include a Do Not Track button, but without any agreement on how Do Not Track should work, the button is pointless.
An initial plan to have Do Not Track up and running by end of the year is looking to be very unlikely at this point. Part of the problem is the large number of stakeholders with competing interests in the situation. For instance, smaller advertisers argue that Do Not Track favors large players like Google and Yahoo, both of which has a vast content network of its own. Even with Do Not Track turned on, those giants will still be able to track users' behavior on their own sites, just not across the rest of the Web. Another problem that came up was when Microsoft opted to turn Do Not Track on by default in its latest version of Internet Explorer. That threw negotiations into more of a whirlwind.
Thankfully, the W3C is determined to break the deadlock, and they believe that they have a solution, even though it may somewhat be a negative idea. In the agenda for its latest face-to-face meeting, the group admitted that "many issues cannot be resolved in a way that does not raise any objections." So, the W3C plans to start pushing all parties forward on the path of least resistance.
"We always seek consensus, but when we can't, we get votes and make decisions," Jacobs said. "Saying 'I don't like this' is not going to be considered a strong objection. We're not going to be held hostage when a group can't make progress."
This situation is definitely one that shows the lack of compromise in today's society. The ordeal over the Do Not Track button can easily be related to Congress today in their inability to toss party lines aside and come together to come to a bipartisan agreement when it comes to some major bills and laws that need to be dealt with. I hope this situation can be ironed out soon because a lot of people are quickly losing hope, and if it isn't figured out soon, it really will run the risk of just disappearing out of people's minds.
Articles
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/29/technology/mediator-appointed-in-do-not-track-efforts.html?_r=0
http://money.cnn.com/2012/11/30/technology/do-not-track/index.html
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