I'm not sure what you think is close to ad hominem, but I'm sorry.
> My perspective from over a decade of software engineering is that you cannot ethically build a (privacy) feature that is "only ever to be opt in only" and not expect (privacy) experts to make a big deal about it ("hey everyone should opt in to this thing that makes your privacy better") and/or encourage other (browser) manufacturers to go ahead and make it default option ("this would make privacy better for non-expert users"). That's not an ethical feature, that's a bait-and-switch no matter what the timescale is between "this feature is opt-in only" and "oh no too many users opted in".
Well I never said it was a particularly "ethical" feature. If they wanted to be ethical they would shut down 90+% of ads.
But you're making a big assumption here, that privacy experts bugging people about it and browsers making it the default would get the same response.
My bet is that privacy experts bugging people about it would have been tolerated just fine, and that most people still wouldn't flip the switch.
But browsers changing the default is qualitatively different from the user being able to set it.
I think your characterization of "too many users opted in" is flat-out wrong. The browser is opting, not the users. And it's not like people were choosing Edge because it would opt them out. That's a completely negligible percent of people.
Another way the two are different is very simple: If you had a big fraction of users manually flipping the switch, and the advertisers tried to cancel the feature because that was too many users, you could mobilize those tens of millions of people into a powerful political campaign to bake DNT into law.
> I believe that entire hype cycle of that feature did far more to setback privacy debates on the web for years than it did to help.
Maybe. But I'd still rather have privacy set back and have sites respecting my do not track header vs. privacy set back and it's completely useless...
As for the rest of your post, I'm confused about what you're accusing the Chrome devs in particular of doing? I agree that they're a big problem, see also flock, but with DNT they're not responsible for what the advertising group does. What could they have done better?
