windows Yahoo has not-so-compelling excuses for abandoning Do Not Track

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Yahoo has announced it's abandoning Do Not Track in favor of forcing users to choose a more personalized experience.

Users can still manage individual privacy settings within Yahoo's Privacy Center, but the company's sites and services will from now on ignore web browsers' Do Not Track preferences.

This is the inherent problem with Do Not Track: you can check the little box in your browser, but it's websites themselves, not browsers, that have power to choose whether or not your activities are recorded.

And companies like Facebook, Google and Yahoo have already been ignoring the setting for years.

Well that's not very nice

Yahoo was moaning about Do Not Track all the way back in 2012, when Microsoft turned it on by default in Internet Explorer 10.

The company said at the time that since users didn't choose to turn it on, the request wouldn't be honored.

That's the sort of thing that has ruined the whole Do Not Track initiative - what good is it if the biggest companies refuse to honor it?

Now Yahoo is trotting out essentially the same argument, about how "the best web is a personalized one," to justify ignoring Do Not Track settings across the board.

Just take our word for it

"Here at Yahoo, we work hard to provide our users with a highly personalized experience," the Yahoo Privacy Team wrote on the company's policies Tumblr. "We fundamentally believe the best web is a personalized one."

"As the first major tech company to implement Do Not Track, we've been at the heart of conversations surrounding how to develop the most user-friendly standard," it continued. "However, we have yet to see a single standard emerge that is effective, easy to use and has been adopted by the broader tech industry.

"Users can still manage their privacy on Yahoo while benefiting from a personalized web experience."

If you say so, Yahoo.

• Facebook does care about privacy, looks out for you 80 trillion times a day

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