Firefox, Chrome Browsers Adding Do-Not-Track Tool

The Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome Web browsers are the first to adopt a do-not-track tool the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been urging the Internet advertising industry to develop.

“Technological and business ingenuity have spawned a whole new online culture and vocabulary – email, IMs, apps and blogs – that consumers have come to expect and enjoy. The FTC wants to help ensure that the growing, changing, thriving information marketplace is built on a framework that promotes privacy, transparency, business innovation and consumer choice. We believe that’s what most Americans want as well,” said FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz last month.

For the Mozilla tool to work, Web advertisers and tracking companies will have to agree not to follow users who enable the do-not-track feature. The non-profit Mozilla Corp.says it will urge companies to "honor people's privacy choices."

Google said its Keep My Opt-Outs feature will let users permanently opt out of ad-tracking cookies. The extension is available immediately in the Chrome Web store.

A simpler but cruder method is to simply delete all of the cookies on one's computer, but this also erases all of the user's automatic sign-ins and other customized settings. The Google extension preserves customized settings while allowing users to opt out of personalized advertising from participating ad networks once and for all.

The Chrome extension is open-source, meaning that other browsers will be able to adopt it easily, providing the opt-out feature to consumers who do not use the Chrome browser.

Microsoft last year removed do-not-track features from its Internet Explorer 8 after advertising expressed concerns about it, The Wall Street Journal reported. Last month, Microsoft said it would revive that feature in IE9.

Increasing pressure

The advertising industry is under increasing pressure to do something about what some see as a big problem and others see as an essential element in providing the "free" content that consumers have come to expect on the Web.

Most major advertising agencies and networks already enable users to opt out of online tracking but the process is not as simple as simply enabling a browser extension, as the FTC noted in a staff report on privacy issues last month.

"Although many companies use privacy policies to explain their information practices, the policies have become long, legalistic disclosures that consumers usually don’t read and don’t understand if they do. Current privacy policies force consumers to bear too much burden in protecting their privacy," the report stated.

The Obama administration has been calling for an online "privacy bill of rights" and Congress is expected to examine online privacy issues this year.

Advertisers generally defend existing practices, saying that building online profiles allows them to deliver more relevant advertising which consumers are, after all, free to ignore if they wish. Most claim the tracking data is not sufficiently detailed to provide names, addresses and other truly personal information.

Some who say they are protecting consumer privacy may have other interests. During a Capitol Hill meeting last year, a top aide to Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) upbraided a group of online publishers, including a ConsumerAffairs.com executive, telling them he was more interested in "saving newspapers" than in accommodating Web publishers.

"You people have a problem and we're going to do something about it," the aide said.