Any modern browser these days comes with an option called Do Not Track aka DNT. The feature is mainly sent from the browser to the website you are visiting, to request the website from tracking your information. While almost all the popular websites follow and respect this, looks like Medium is wanting an exception, for a good reason.
Medium launched with a huge buzz and climbed to the top very soon with the quality of content that were submitted by the users, as well as the design and user experience the website carried. But such amazing portal, comes with a disadvantage. It is reported that the website wants to override the Do Not Track request from your browser.
While this is a statement in Medium. There’s also a contradicting statement the company has given in the Privacy Policy:
We respect Do Not Track (“DNT”) settings in browsers. If you are logged out of our services and have DNT enabled, we will not set cookies that can be used to aggregate information about your usage. We may use some cookies to enhance your experience by storing preferences or options. Again, you must have cookies enabled in order to log into our services.
While we love Medium, there are other blogging platforms like Svbtle, which carries really good content. The platform has been under constant criticism for quite sometime now, for the drop in the quality of content that are being posted there. On the other hand, the platform also lacks one of the major features that a very basic blog would provide, RSS feeds. This is probably beneficial to the Medium people since users hit their site without checking the feed from other applications.
We are still not sure why Medium would want to override the users’ DNT settings. But we think this move by Medium will make other websites to track the users’ information by overriding them, thus killing the value of DNT.