“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 Peter Eckersley, chief computer scientist at the EFF.
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While a “Do Not Track” setting has become standard in most browsers today, including Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, it’s commonly known that internet advertisers still have ways of tracking users.
However, the service isn’t compulsory, so it’s unlikely to prevent the likes of Facebook from tracking web users across the internet without their consent.
The document is intended to provide users strong privacy protections, however, in the current web environment only a few companies are going to be willing and able to post it, EFF further added.
The coalition behind the stronger DNT setting is led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Disconnect, a privacy software platform used by over 10 million people.
Casey Oppenheim, who is one of the co-founders of the EFF, and who also worked on this brand new policy, notes that publishers are taking advantage of this loophole, and this must stop. So the new Do Not Track standard would both protect consumers’ right to privacy, and incentivize advertisers to respect users’ choice, “paving a path that allows privacy and advertising to coexist”.
The new DNT coalition includes privacy company Disconnect, the Adblock browser extension, privacy-centric search engine DuckDuckGo, analytics service Mixpanel, and the website Medium.
The new DNT standard is not an ad- or tracker-blocker, but it works in tandem with these technologies. They still keep your data tightly wrapped in their servers, but they just don’t use it. 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. It allows domain operators to declare that they are onboard with DNT so that privacy-protecting software knows how aggressively to block communications with the site.
For more information, read the press release.
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While all major browsers enable users to send Do Not Track requests, Kastrenakes notes that the remaining problem is that there are no clear guidelines on what a website should do when it receives the request.
