Online advertising explanation to net browsers

Online advertising explanation to net browsers

The brief of America's Federal Trade Commission (FTC) does not typically extend to its wards' corporate communications. That did not stop Ed Felten, the FTC's technology chief, from breaking the news that Twitter was jumping on the "Do Not Track" (DNT) bandwagon, a move the firm later confirmed—in a tweet, naturally. The microblogging giant is the latest to let a user specify in a web browser that he does not wish his behaviour to be followed and used for targeted advertising or assembling personal profiles.
The FTC has its nose in DNT because the directive needs regulatory enforcement and civil liability to be workable. Chris Soghoian, a former FTC staffer who helped come up with DNT and shepherd it at times, explains that advertisers' explicit agreement to respect users' wishes means that the FTC can pursue those who nonetheless disregard them for "deceptive practices", which falls under the agency's purview. Individuals, meanwhile, have a contractual basis on which to sue companies which renege on their word.

Technically, DNT is a bit of text which reads "DNT: 1" (where "1" stands for "on" and "0" would mean "off"). This is sent as web metadata, part of the hidden messages that a web browser and web server exchange when negotiating to receive a page or media file. When a switch in an internet browser's options is flipped to "do not track", companies like Twitter that have signed up to the pledge will no longer record information about a visitor's behaviour when the user employs that browser.
The DNT switch has already been included in Mozilla's Firefox and Microsoft's Internet Explorer, while Apple hides the option in its Safari browser among software developer features. Google's Chrome has a downloadable plug-in to enable DNT that will be built into future versions of the software. Another popular browser, Opera, has the option in its current beta version. These five companies' desktop browsers account for nearly all computer surfing (mobile browsers lag in this regard). An independent site run by privacy and security researchers, called donottrack.us, explains how to flip the switch in each of them. In Firefox, for instance, the setting is labeled "Tell websites I do not want to be tracked" and the default option is off. Mozilla says 9% of desktop Firefox users and 19% of its plant surfers have checked the box (while noting that it "does not collect or store personal information about our users to determine these statistics").