Firefox Removes “Do Not Track”
Venkat (via Hacker News):
According to Wikipedia, DNT was introduced in 2009 by researchers Christopher Soghoian and Sid Stamm, and Mozilla Firefox was the first browser to implement this feature.
However, as we approach 2025, with growing concerns about online privacy and data protection, Mozilla believes that DNT is no longer an effective privacy measure. Many websites ignore the DNT signal. Therefore, Mozilla has removed the DNT signal from Firefox version 135.
Mozilla says it was not honored and so provided a false sense of privacy, and Apple said it could be used for fingerprinting. I don’t understand why something like this couldn’t be used to avoid cookie banners, for sites that are trying to play by the rules.
Previously:
- Firefox at 20
- Apple Is Removing “Do Not Track” From Safari
- Twitter Abandons “Do Not Track” Privacy Protection
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The idea of asking a site to do something and have it honor a request that is in the user’s interest and not the service’s sounds increasingly quaint.
If sites cared at all what users wanted, we wouldn’t need a DNT header in the first place.
The cookie banners were put there by bureaucracy, so once again no one actually cares how it works, just that they can tick the requirements checkbox.
