The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recently announced that the nascent Do Not Track (DNT) proposal, which was designed to give users a way to tell web sites not to track them, has now reached the "Last Call" stage.
Last call is what comes just before a standard becomes recommended, which is W3C-speak for done. Indeed most browsers have already implemented at least some aspects of the proposed Do Not Track standard.
Unfortunately the Do Not Track standard and the tools already available in web browsers are useless because by and large the advertising industry does not honor it.
There are a handful of sites that will respect your DNT settings, should you turn them on. Twitter and Medium are among the biggest sites to do so. But the largely unknown ad networks that load cookies in the background on your favorite sites have, thus far, totally ignored the Do Not Track header.
Despite the seeming clarity built into the name, many advertisers claim they're befuddled by what users broadcasting Do Not Track might want. Former Yahoo "Chief Trust Officer", Anne Toth (now at Slack) once claimed that "when a consumer puts Do Not Track in the header, we don't know what they mean." This profound lack of respect for users is a large part of both why the web needs something like Do Not Track and why it has thus far been largely been ignored by the ad industry.
Originally conceived by Mozilla, Do Not Track has always lacked teeth because there's no way to enforce it. Your browser can broadcast the DNT header to websites all it likes, but it's up the goodwill of the sites to actually honor it. It's a bit like telling politely asking the wolf not to eat the sheep.
When Mozilla first unveiled Do Not Track back in 2011 most users were blissfully unaware of how closely they were being tracked and how much that data could tell advertisers about them.
Thanks in large part to Edward Snowden's presence in the news that's no longer true. Granted the kind of spy agency tracking Snowden revealed is considerably more sophisticated than your average ad network's tracking capabilities, but for most users it all falls under the banner of "online privacy".
And according to a Pew Internet survey released earlier this year users care about online privacy. In fact a whopping 93 percent of U.S. adults say that being in control of who can get information about them is "important" and 74 percent go further and call it "very important".
Most publishers though have embraced an advertising-based revenue model that works much better -- both for readers and advertisers -- when ads are tailored to users' interests. The only way to tailor to user interest though is to discover what those interests are.
This leaves the web at something of an impasse.
Users don't want to be tracked, but neither do they seem willing to pay for content. If there's no revenue there's no content.
What the web really needs is some magical third way, but in lieu of that Do Not Track could have offered a middle road for the time being. Instead, so far, it had been an abject failure.
Still, it's not users who need to lament the failure of Do Not Track.
It's the advertisers -- and by extension publishers -- who missed an opportunity. By failing to support Do Not Track the advertising industry is going to end up getting something with much more far reaching consequences -- ad blockers.
Tech savvy users haven't seen an ad in years. Tech savvy users have ad blockers and privacy tools like Ghostery. And that is beginning to trickle down to more and more users on the web.
Searches for terms like "ad blocker" or "ad block" have been increasing steadily for many years, and jump up even more dramatically in the last two years.
And less tech savvy users may soon be joining the rest of us on the ad blocked web if Apple and Mozilla move forward with their plans for built in tracker blocking tools in Safari and Firefox.
Instead of finding a happy middle ground, the advertising industry is going to end up facing tools far more powerful and far-reaching than a header broadcast by a web browser.
Instead of a web standard that most people probably would never have known about or turned on, advertisers are going to get built-in ad blockers and cookie blocking tools like the EFF's Privacy Badger, which automatically block tracking cookies from sites that refuse to support DNT.
Instead of having a chance to try tactics like denying content to users with DNT turned on (one possible market solution for sites that can't think beyond advertising and tracking), advertisers won't know for sure if they reached users or not. Instead of a little less data, or perhaps even a little more data, many users will simply disappear behind their own privacy tools.
That the ad industry still doesn't get it can be seen in its proposals to further weaken the DO Not Track standard. Many in the industry want language in the standard that would allow companies to interpret "Do Not Track" to apply only to tracking that directly serves targeted advertising. That is, they would like to continue tracking even in the presence of a Do Not Track header, but not use any gathered information for advertising. Instead it would be used for things like "market research" or to improve products.
Luckily for the ad industry the Last Call period that DNT has just entered will last for three months during which objections will no doubt be heard. After that though, statements like Toth's won't just be disingenuous, they'll be false. Once Do Not Track becomes a bona fide standard it will be very clear what Do Not Track means. All that will remain to be seen is whether or not any advertisers will support.
In the mean time the rest of us will be happily routing around the damage with ad blockers and privacy tools.