Well, okay, that wasn’t exactly Yahoo!’s blog headline, but in today’s episode of “Rationalization 101, the Sequel,” Yahoo! explains why it will ignore IE 10’s default Do Not Track:
Yahoo! has been working with our partners in the Internet industry to come up with a standard that allows users to opt out of certain website analytics and ad targeting. In principle, we support “Do Not Track” (DNT). Unfortunately, because discussions have not yet resulted in a final standard for how to implement DNT, the current DNT signal can easily be abused. Recently, Microsoft unilaterally decided to turn on DNT in Internet Explorer 10 by default, rather than at users’ direction. In our view, this degrades the experience for the majority of users and makes it hard to deliver on our value proposition to them. It basically means that the DNT signal from IE10 doesn’t express user intent.
Read more on Yahoo!’s Policy Blog.
It’s not really paternalistic. It is crap. The real excuse is this:
“Our business model relies on being able to track user behaviour. As such anything which denies us this ability is a threat and we intend on doing everything we can to subvert and ignore user preferences.
We said that the DNT signal from IE 10 doesn’t express user intent. What we really meant to say was that it does not express leaching advertiser intent.”
Perfect. Have you considered a career as a translator or bullsh*t detector?
Interesting thought for a career change – does it pay well?