Firefox is getting rid of its 'Do Not Track' setting and what it's being replaced with is a bit of a bait and switch for privacy concerns

pcgamer.com:

Anyone else feel like the past decade has been one of the gradual normalisation of privacy-defiling practices? If so, you'll be saddened to hear that Mozilla is binning the 'Do Not Track' (DNT) privacy option in version 135 of Firefox. It's already gone in the Nightly developer release and it should be gone from the standard release on February 4, 2025, when 135 launches.

The Mozilla Do Not Track support page states (via The Register): «Starting in Firefox version 135, the 'Do Not Track' checkbox will be removed. Many sites do not respect this indication of a person's privacy preferences, and, in some cases, it can reduce privacy.

»If you wish to ask websites to respect your privacy, you can use the 'Tell websites not to sell or share my data' setting. This option is built on top of the Global Privacy Control (GPC). GPC is respected by increasing numbers of sites and enforced with legislation in some regions."

This might initially sound like not such a bad thing, the way Mozilla talks about it. But it is, in my opinion, part of a broader trend to bait and switch general privacy concerns for more specific ones. Let me explain.

DNT is a request header that asks sites you visit—you guessed it—not to track you. Websites can then decide whether to adhere to this request, but the idea is to make it so users can easily signal to sites their privacy preferences without having to set these preferences for every site. Whether sites have to adhere to these requests would then be a legal matter depending on the laws in different regions and so on.

While it's true that most sites simply ignore these requests, I'd argue that's a legal or enforcement issue and not an issue with the DNT request specification itself. This is in the same way that there's nothing wrong with requesting people don't punch you in the face. Even if people keep ignoring that request and get away with it, the request itself is reasonable, don't you think?

The argument, or at least the implication, seems to