making DNT easier for web sites

Jos Boumans has done some analysis about the effect of turning on Do Not Track in your browser, and his findings show that sites in general are slow to show that they support the feature.

"As it stands, only 4 out of 482 measured top 500 sites are actively responding to the DNT header being sent." (Link)

As a user, it's hard to tell if sites are honoring my Do Not Track request, and as a site developer, it might be a daunting task to hack up my back-end code.  The W3C Tracking Protection working group at the W3C are working on helping out transparency and implementations, but in the meantime Jos has released his mod_cookietrack apache module to make it easier for site owners to track their users' clicks in a respectful way -- right now.
The Apache module, mod_cookietrack, does all sorts of stuff like mod_usertrack, but one thing it does better is honor DNT; if a server using this module sees "DNT: 1" in an HTTP request, it replaces the tracking cookie with one that says "DNT" -- something that's not unique to a visitor.

Apparently it was a lot of work to get DNT supported properly in mod_cookietrack, a native browser module that performs well and is safe on multiple threads, so thanks Jos for your hard work so that more organizations can support DNT on their web sites.

More:

• The State of Do Not Track
• Be Do Not Track compliant in 30 microseconds or less

behavioral advertising icon

I think self regulation in the behavioral ad industry is generally productive, but this IAB press release suggests the newest effort is promoting something that will induce a false sense of disclosure.

This Advertising Option Icon thing is something I heard rumblings about a little while back. The idea is to badge ads that use your behavior, and badge sites who collect your behavior for this use.

A couple of things make me skeptical:

First, this is a stigmatizing mark -- a tattoo that will label pages as "spying" to some and other simply won't notice. I'm willing to bet that such an icon won't be an effective indicator (no matter what the self-regulating body claims) since people
won't pay attention. We all know how poorly the lock icon worked, and people actually paid attention to that one. As an added disincentive, major advertisers have to pay yearly to use the tattoo.

Second, not just advertisers do this tracking, and the advertisers can capitalize on this. They would likely find a way to use third parties for data collection in order to get around the requirement of showing the badge.

Finally, the icon is a play button looking thing. Nothing in the visual suggests what's going on. A pair of eyeballs might be a more intuitive representation.

Icons in web pages aren't going to help. My opinion is that if we want to represent hidden behavior to users we have to have more flexibility. Such visual representations shouldn't be limited to ads, because if we start using icons to represent this tracking behavior for other contexts, the number of icons users must understand multiplies.

Aza's privacy icons project is a good direction; I think it would encompass what is being attempted here without restricting it to ads and with more efficacy since it would be one comprehensive set for all the web.