Why Do-Not-Track browser settings are useless and what to do about it

The long fight over Do-Not-Track followed a predictable trajectory: a detailed, meaningful pro-privacy system was subverted by big business, and then published as a "standard" that offered virtually no privacy protections.

Today, turning on the Do-Not-Track setting in your browser does virtually nothing (Medium and Pintrest offer some support, everyone else not so much).

EFF's Privacy Badger blocks ads from companies that don't comply with Do-Not-Track, so running Privacy Badger is a way to give your browser settings some teeth.

The biggest obstacle was advertisers who didnt want to give up delicious data and revenue streams; they insisted that DNT would kill online growth and stymied the process. (You can chart the death of Do Not Track by the declining number of emails sent around on the W3C list-serv.) By the time the debate was winding down at the end of 2013, it wasnt even about not tracking people, just not targeting them, meaning trackers could still collect the data but couldnt use it to show people intrusive ads based on what theyd collected. The inability to reach a compromise on what DNT should be led sites like Reddit to declare there is no accepted standard for how a website should respond to [the Do Not Track] signal, [so] we do not take any action in response to this signal.

To demonstrate their theoretical support for DNTor from a more skeptical perspective, to garner some positive pressGoogle, Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla, and others started offering the Do Not Track option in their respective browsers, but absent a consensus around the actions required in response to the DNT:1 signal, these browsers are just screaming for privacy into a void.