Apache HTTP Server is the world’s most popular web server, and the patch – named “Apache does not tolerate deliberate abuse of open standards” by its creator Roy Fielding – will effectively ignore the header even if the actual choice was made by a human.
“The only reason DNT exists is to express a non-default option. That’s all it does. It does not protect anyone’s privacy unless the recipients believe it was set by a real human being, with a real preference for privacy over personalization,” explained Fielding, who is one of the founders of the Apache HTTP Server Project but also a scientist at Adobe and one of the editors of the DNT standard.