Marchingontogether
TK Veteran
The tech giant has dumped support for its Do Not Track feature, explaining that it was done because of lack of a single standard across the industry. Do Not Track feature was part of HTTP and a privacy setting which could tell advertisers whether or not Internet users wanted to be tracked across web surfing. The feature was turned off in most browsers, and people had to opt in to get protected.
The problem is that the feature does nothing to force advertisers to honor it and most of the ad providers simply ignore it. This is no surprising as they are evolved from door-to-door salespeople never taking “no” for an answer.
Yahoo was reported to be the first major tech company to introduce Do Not Track feature, but the company had yet to see a single standard emerge that would be effective, easy to use and adopted by the rest of the industry members.
Now the search giant decided that the “the best Internet is a personalized one” and that dropping Do Not Track may provide users with a more “personalized experience”. In response, the Open Rights Group claimed companies like Yahoo had “sabotaged the Do Not Track standard”. The outfit believes that the industry participants need to respect people’s privacy and re-establish trust that has been previously undermined by pervasive, permission less collection of data via cookie-based tracking.
In the meantime, users can still opt out of tracking on Yahoo in the Privacy Policy section of its website. Everyone who has Yahoo account can sign in there to enable this setting for every computer with one. An alternative way to opt out is on a device-by-device basis.
The problem is that the feature does nothing to force advertisers to honor it and most of the ad providers simply ignore it. This is no surprising as they are evolved from door-to-door salespeople never taking “no” for an answer.
Yahoo was reported to be the first major tech company to introduce Do Not Track feature, but the company had yet to see a single standard emerge that would be effective, easy to use and adopted by the rest of the industry members.
Now the search giant decided that the “the best Internet is a personalized one” and that dropping Do Not Track may provide users with a more “personalized experience”. In response, the Open Rights Group claimed companies like Yahoo had “sabotaged the Do Not Track standard”. The outfit believes that the industry participants need to respect people’s privacy and re-establish trust that has been previously undermined by pervasive, permission less collection of data via cookie-based tracking.
In the meantime, users can still opt out of tracking on Yahoo in the Privacy Policy section of its website. Everyone who has Yahoo account can sign in there to enable this setting for every computer with one. An alternative way to opt out is on a device-by-device basis.