The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was just coming online around the same time DNT was abandoned. If it had only held out a little longer, it might have been relevant. Without any legal reason to comply, it never caught on and was eventually abandoned. It turns out that DNT was a little ahead of its time. And in an ironic twist, the very fact that your browser set this flag made you more trackable. They used this move as another reason to ignore the flag. Advertisers were outraged because the flag was supposed to be an affirmative action taken by the user. At one point, Microsoft took it upon themselves to automatically enable the DNT flag for Internet Explorer users. But there were also a couple interesting twists to the story. The obvious problem here is that websites (at that time) were under precisely zero obligation to comply. Their browser would, in turn, tell every website you visited that you did not wish to be tracked.

Back in 2009, a group of researchers had a brilliant idea: why don’t we give users a way to tell every website they visit that they don’t want to be tracked? They came up with a simple, global Do Not Track (DNT) flag that users could set on their web browser once and forget it.

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