Issue with "Navigator.doNotTrack": What was this deprecated tech replaced with?

[andypillip]

MDN URL: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/doNotTrack

What information was incorrect, unhelpful, or incomplete?

The deprecation-note is quite unhelpful, since it does not state what it was replaced with.

Specific section or headline?

The deprecation note.

What did you expect to see?

Some explanation of what the DnT setting was replaced with.

MDN Content page report details

• Folder: en-us/web/api/navigator/donottrack
• MDN URL: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/doNotTrack
• GitHub URL: https://github.com/mdn/content/blob/main/files/en-us/web/api/navigator/donottrack/index.md
• Last commit: 2279e5a
• Document last modified: 2021-09-14T18:08:09.000Z

[himanshugarg]

Thanks for reporting. Without really addressing the issue reported, these are the Request Headers on FF 91:-

Do Not Track OFF	Do Not Track ON

[teoli2003]

Unfortunately, nothing has replaced DNT. DNT has never worked because it was not a browser feature it was a browser feature AND a website developer one, more precisely a cooperative feature where advertisement companies had to abide too.

They never did and decided not to.

The feature is therefore useless. Moreover, it is harmful as it increases the entropy of the headers (read the likelihood of sending unique headers that can be used to track you).

Browser makers abandoned the project and decided to fight tracking by other means, like fine an alternative to cookies (Chrome if I remember well), or limitation to non-first-party cookies (like Safari and Firefox if I remember well). None of these alternatives became universally recognized until now. Maybe in the future.

Hope this helps. Maybe we should add some text explaining this, but this would need some research to find sources for what I just summarized (that are my remembering of the situation), or we can just leave it as is until an alternative is agreed upon.

What do you think?

[hamishwillee]

@teoli2003 IMO it is worth confirming your memory and adding the additional information that this is pointless to implement. Otherwise developers may choose to implement this even if deprecated, on the assumption that it is reasonable to use now given fairly broad browser support.

[Pomax]

A counter to "the feature is therefore useless": I don't care about huge advertisers or megacorp websites. They're going to abuse the web as much as money lets them, and nothing browsers do will stop that, ever. I do care about making sure my websites respect DNT and don't load things like google analytics when the client says they don't want me to do that (both personally, and on websites I am paid to work on).

Just because the giants refuse to abide doesn't mean it wasn't, and still is, a good idea that good people can use to do the right thing.