The actual industry standard for Do Not Track is to ignore it. It is deprecated. The browser we are talking about in this post, Firefox, removed support for Do Not Track in February of this year.
I was a bit glib with my answer, but I don’t think what they said is wrong. Just because something is a written standard doesn’t mean it is an observed standard. WaPo was clearly referring to the lack of an observed standard. I don’t think they were denying the existence of API specifications, nor do I think that’s a reasonable interpretation. They’re saying that nobody treated it the same way, which is true, and it’s also the reason why it was deprecated in the first place.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...