DescentBB

Will the new "do not track" bill keep me from tracking activity on my own site if it's made into a law?

If you use your site to track where they go after they leave and or as much as possible about what they do after you hook them, then probably. But if your site only tracks when someone visited it and perhaps their referral URL like virtually everything out there, it probably wouldn't impact you at all.

But before all that; I would seriously question if it is even possible to implement such a system and how much it would cost to attempt it. The net just doesn't work that way, in order to not track someone, you would have to track them to begin with! The concept is ridiculous.

If I were to craft an online privacy bill, I would instead outlaw types of forced, embedded or hidden tracking (such as ISP level packet inspection and clickstream data recording). Basically make it illegal to track people in ways that cannot be defeated without requiring the use of an offshore VPN. The rest I would encourage the free market to solve, much like antivirus software can help protect you from malware there needs to be antitracking software to protect users from invasive tracking.

I simply do not believe the government could handle this problem with legislation, everything about tracking technology changes too fast and is simply not something that can be fixed the way a government agency would approach it, not to mention the huge conflict of interest.

For some reason I'd assumed it was extra data added to the HTTP requests the browser sends. Obviously it would then be up to the vendors to honour it, and you wouldn't easily know whether they did or not.