For years now, checking the “do-not-track” option on your browser has been little more than wishful thinking on the part of users who care about privacy online. But now a group led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation is looking to make that a more meaningful action.
The EFF and others
have published a standard policy it hopes advertisers, analytics companies and publishers will adopt in order to respect the wishes of users who don’t want to be tracked online. Getting the support needed to make a real difference will be an uphill battle, they acknowledge.
The policy document specifies what a website needs to do to honor the wishes of users whose browsers have DNT (do not track) turned on. DNT is an option in browsers and mobile operating systems (iOS and Firefox OS) that uses an HTTP header to tell websites that the users doesn’t want to be tracked.
