The state of “Do Not Track”

Over the last few weeks, “Do Not Track” has been getting a lot of attention; Mozilla introduced DNT into FireFox as of January 2011 and has a very good FAQ up on the subject. Last week, the official announcement came from the big browser vendors, including Microsoft and Google, that they’d start incorporating DNT as a browser feature as well, which coincided nicely with the White House announcing a privacy bill of rights.

It’s great to see online data privacy finally being taken seriously, especially after the various shades of gray we have been seeing lately. Some of which are just plain scary.

But sending a “Do Not Track” header in your browser is one thing, having the server on the other side, and perhaps even more importantly, their (advertising) partners honor the request is quite another. And unfortunately, the the current state of affairs isn’t great; taken from Mozillas FAQ as mentioned above:

Companies are starting to support Do Not Track, but you may not notice any changes initially. We are actively working with companies that have started to implement Do Not Track, with others who have committed to doing so soon.

Let’s take a quick look at the current cookie setting practices from the top 500 websites, as counted by alexa. I ran a quick scan against http://www.domain.com, once with and once without a DNT header. Of those 500 sites, 482 gave useful replies; some of the most used domains are CDNs or don’t have top level content, so they are excluded.

From the chart below, you can see that most sites set 1-2 cookies, and that most of those cookies are somehow related to user or session specific data.

I’d have added a third line showing you the delta in cookies set when the DNT header was set, but the sad truth is that only 3 websites changed their cookie behavior based on the DNT header: Kudos to 9gag.com for not setting any cookies and blackhatworld.com & movie2k.com for at least dropping one of their user specific cookies. The outlier with a whopping 18 cookies, 10 of which are personally identifiable, is walmart.com.

Now, setting a user/session cookie is not necessarily a bad thing; for one thing, you can not read the DNT header from JavaScript, so if you’d want to be DNT compliant in JS, you’d have to set a DNT cookie (although not part of the public standard, some newer browsers are starting to support inspecting the DNT setting from the DOM). The industry standard is now to set a cookie matching the string “DNT” or “OPTOUT”. Again, unfortunately, non of the top 500 websites actually do this when the DNT header is set.

The other viable option is to send back the same cookie, but set the expiry time in the past so that it’s removed by the browser. Although this would be silly on a first request (it would be better not to set a cookie at all in that case), and is not as useful in a JavaScript environment, it’d still be making an effort towards DNT compliance. From the top 500, only forbes.com is using this technique currently.

As it stands, only 4 out of 482 measured top 500 sites are actively responding to the DNT header being sent.

The FTC has been calling for a “Do Not Track” implementation and according to Mozilla, now 7% of Desktop Firefox users and 18% of Mobile Firefox users already have DNT enabled. With such a clear call from regulators and end users, why are so few sites actually following up with a solid implementation? And what does that mean for the advertising and widget partners they use, whose whole model is based around being able to use your personal data?

Again the answer is not very encouraging. The Wall Street Journal did a great investigation into this with their “What They Know” series and have found that even websites that you trust and use every day have literally hundreds of trackers ushered in when you visit them:

(full disclosure: I work for Krux, whose findings were featured in the WSJ “What They Know” series and we published a whitepaper on the subject)

If you browse through the above charts, it becomes obvious that your personal data is flying across the web and you have very little control of who takes it, how they use it and who they might be selling it on to.

The folks at PrivacyScore even built an index to show you how much your data is at risk when visiting any particular website. Some of the scores, like the one for Target are quite scary, and is illustrated by this story about how Target found out a girl was pregnant before her dad even did.

Bottom line, the worst offenders tend to be in the online merchant, advertising networks or widget providers space (especially those of the ‘free’ variety – because nothing is every really ‘free’) that play fast and loose with your personal data in order to optimize their own revenue. To illustrate the point, here’s a choice quote from the above article:

“AddThis has its own plans to sell user data, but it’s not looking to publishers as the main buyers. It will sell analytics on user data directly to ad agencies and brands themselves and will get a bigger cut by doing so.”

So, why is it hard for the good eggs to do the right thing, even though it’s making them look like bad eggs in the process? Part of it is awareness I’m sure, but another part of it is simply the challenge of implementing a good “Do Not Track” solution. Implementing DNT at scale is actually not that easy, and we spent a fair amount of time at Krux to get it right.

To further the cause of Data Privacy, we’re open sourcing our solution and it will be the topic of my next blogpost, in the hope that all the good eggs will at least be able to Do The Right thing easily, and making it easier for the rest of us to call the bad eggs on their behavior.

P.S, if you want to see where your personal data is going when you visit a webpage, we released a FireFox browser plugin called Krux Inspector, which you can install directly from our website. It shows you exactly who is bringing in which advertisers and partners on the webpage you’re viewing, and what personal data they’re skimming as well as the beacons they’re dropping.