Though if you just want a simple ENV var that handles this WHILE honoring the specification on this page: https://github.com/alloydwhitlock/do-not-track-cli
Plenty of people seem to genuinely believe that “personalized ads” are good for them.
Depending on the study, 0.16% to 7% want to get tracked.
https://noyb.eu/sites/default/files/2025-07/Pay_or_Okay_Repo...
No, in not making excuses for tracking and I do lots of stuff myself of avoid being tracked
I’m only responding to the false premise that there are no benefits. There are. You can just choose to believe they aren’t worth the cost. I believe they aren’t but I have friends who opt into all tracking and even register their presence with multiple apps. They believe they’ll make more positive connections
Exactly. From my experience: the times I've found an ad relevant and worth clicking is about one-to-a-gazillion. Maybe relevance is higher for others but that still doesn't necessarily translate to real value. (ie. your life was improved in any way)
Also, this all presumes the targeting actually works and the current sea ads for shoes I just bought disagree with that. It's all just spam.
The biggest failure of DNT was browser makers - including Mozilla - removing it. It has zero performance impact (1 bit?) or development cost. As long as it was out there, when there was momentum against tracking, advocates had evidence of both demand for privacy and of trackers ignoring user wishes.
This evidence both still exists and is also completely useless for anything. The more important consideration, by far, is that the DNT flag was actively harmful to users in the real world because, if it was acknowledged at all, it was used maliciously to help fingerprint and track users. There is no reason for browsers to continue providing to their users a toggle that not only misleads them about what will happen with the setting enabled, but actively contributes to the opposite outcome because we live in a world where being evil is the norm.
But isn't DNT deprecated in most browsers? Maybe I misremember.