Does Stack Overflow honor the Do not track header... or is support going to be added later? ...(it doesn't seem to honor the header at the moment).
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2What would you expect SO to do to honour the header? The only thing I can think of is not keep a session cookie for anonymous users... But that would suck for stats. I can understand how one wouldn't want to do that.– PekkaOct 19, 2011 at 16:56
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2 Answers
We do not do anything special for the proposed spec. There is no requirement anywhere that we implement anything. A bill may be passed in congress one day, who knows.
If this proposal gains tons of traction and the industry starts following this practice we will stop serving the quantcast and google analytics tracking if the header is present.
Keep in mind, the proposal says nothing about internal tracking, its about 3rd parties. You will not be able to use this header to hide your tracks we will always continue storing every hit to our sites in our mega haproxy database.
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1I understand that while you don't plan on implementing it, it's hardly because its a proposed spec...and you shouldn't paint it as such. Just an fyi, it is endorsed by the FTC. Oct 27, 2011 at 21:14
Glancing at the draft spec, Do Not Track only seems to apply to third-party tracking, such as from ad networks/servers. As such, Stack Overflow's unregistered sessions/accounts wouldn't be a violation. SO's ad network/server seems to be Adzerk. I've just asked their "Live Help", and he wasn't aware of Do Not Track (though he said he'd read up on it).
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Good point about Adzerk, interested to see what they're going to say. I guess they are going to fight it tooth and nail (like Google seem to be doing)– PekkaOct 19, 2011 at 17:08
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Do not track being widely adopted would heavily hurt Google analytics and force many people to do the analysis internally.– wafflesOct 26, 2011 at 3:16
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Do Not Track would more than hurt it, it would effectively disable it. As such Chrome is the only major browser not to support it. Oct 27, 2011 at 21:10