Coalition Announces New ‘Do Not Track’ Standard for Web Browsing
Policy Offers Stronger Privacy Protection and Promotes Advertising Best Practices
Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), privacy company
Disconnect and a coalition of Internet companies have announced a
stronger “Do Not Track” (DNT) setting for Web browsing—a new policy
standard that, coupled with privacy software, will better protect users
from sites that try to secretly follow and record their Internet
activity, and incentivize advertisers and data collection companies to
respect a user’s choice not to be tracked online.
The EFF and Disconnect’s partners in this launch are the innovative
publishing site Medium, major analytics service Mixpanel, popular ad-
and tracker-blocking extension AdBlock, and private search engine
DuckDuckGo.
“We are greatly pleased that so many important Web services are
committed to this powerful new implementation of Do Not Track, giving
their users a clear opt-out from stealthy online tracking and the
exploitation of their reading history,” said EFF Chief Computer
Scientist Peter Eckersley. “These companies understand that clear and
fair practices around analytics and advertising are essential not only
for privacy but for the future of online commerce.”
DNT is a preference you can set on Firefox, Chrome, or other Web
browsers as well as in the iOS and FirefoxOS mobile operating systems to
signal to websites that you want to opt-out of tracking of your online
activities. Tracking by advertisers and other third parties is
commonplace on the Web today, and typically occurs without the
knowledge, permission, or consent of Internet users. You can see
evidence of this when ads appear around the Web that are eerily based
upon your past browsing habits; meanwhile, the underlying records and
profiles of your online activity are distributed between a vast network
of advertising exchanges, data brokers, and tracking companies.
The new DNT standard is not an ad- or tracker-blocker, but it works in tandem with these technologies.
