DuckDuckGo Proposes 'Do-Not-Track Act of 2019'

'"When you turn on the setting in your browser that says 'Do Not
Track', you probably expect to no longer be tracked on most websites
you visit. Right? Well, you would be wrong," explains DuckDuckGo's
blog.

Their recent study found "a quarter of people have turned on this
setting" -- representing hundreds of millions of web surfers -- and
that most of them were unaware that in fact, "no law requires websites
to respect your Do Not Track signals, and the vast majority of sites,
including most all of the big tech companies, sadly choose to simply
ignore them."

Now they've written draft legislation -- "the Do-Not-Track Act of
2019" -- to "serve as a starting point" for legislators to close this
loophole. SearchEngineLand reports:

If the act picks up steam and passes into law, sites would be required
to cease certain user tracking methods, which means less data
available to inform marketing and advertising campaigns. The impact
could also cascade into platforms that leverage consumer data,
possibly making them less effective. For example, one of the
advantages of advertising on a platform like Google or Facebook is the
ability to target audiences. If a user enables DNT, the ads displayed
to them when browsing those websites won't be informed by their
external browsing history...

This proposal is quite far from being signed into law, but the
technology is already built into Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Edge and
Internet Explorer. With the adoption of GDPR just a year behind us and
presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren's proposed legislation to
regulate "big tech companies" drawing more attention to digital
privacy issues in Washington, the Do-Not-Track Act could be a
realistic outcome.

DuckDuckGo says they're announcing their draft legislation because "It
is extremely rare to have such an exciting legislative opportunity
like this, where the hardest work -- coordinated mainstream technical
implementation and widespread consumer adoption -- is already done....

"We hope the Do-Not-Track Act of 2019 serves as a useful guide to
start thinking seriously about this amazing legislative opportunity."'

-- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/19/05/03/2316223

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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