The fine folks at Mozilla have announced that they’ll be hosting a BBQ in Dallas to thank all their supporters. And the cool thing about that BBQ is it’s gonna be vegan by default. You know, vegan. No animal products. It’s good for you. It’s the right default. They’ll have dead cow burgers, but you’ll have to find the special line.
Obviously, I’m just kidding. Mozilla isn’t hosting a vegan BBQ in Dallas, but they are hosting one for your browsing privacy, by their choice for the “Do Not Track” (DNT) setting.
Poll after poll shows that people around the world prefer privacy, in the same sort of way they prefer cow burgers. This preference is stable, extending back decades, and being shown in nearly every poll. So why is Mozilla defaulting to not setting DNT?
Meanwhile, [some participants in] the W3C [working group are] is suggesting that the best we can possibly do is whenever you install a new browser, it goes through an Eliza-like process of interviewing you about weird technical settings, rather than having a great first-run experience.
Now it’s true, some people are ok with a tradeoff between what advertisers want (to trade content for ads) and what they want (privacy). Some advertisers go so far as to claim that there would be no content without ads, and they are, simply, flatly wrong. There is and will continue to be, content like this, which I hope you’re enjoying. I’ll draw to your attention that this blog is ad-free. We write because we have ideas we want to share. I’m sure that with fewer ads, we’d see less Paris Hilton ‘content’. But more importantly, the advertising industry is good at spreading messages. If they need DNT “off”, perhaps they could spread the message of why that’s a good thing for people, and, as is their wont and charter, convince people to make that change.
But the simple truth, known to the ad industry, the W3C and to Mozilla, is that most people prefer not to be tracked, in the same way most people prefer beef burgers. The “please let us track you” people have a hard message to spread, which is why they prefer to fight in relative obscurity over defaults.
Some additional background links: “Ad industry whines while privacy wonks waffle,” “Could the W3C stop IE 10’s Do Not Track plans?”
I should be clear that my distaste at the idea of a vegan BBQ is mine. Even if my employer and I both prefer beef burgers, my opinions are mine, theirs are theirs, and I didn’t cook this blog up with them.
[Update: Clarified that I didn’t mean to imply the decision was that of the W3C as a whole.]
