AP Adopts Firefox's 'Do Not Track'; Others On the Way

theweatherelectric writes "As noted by the Mozilla Blog, the AP News Registry is the first large scale service to support the Do Not Track (DNT) feature of Firefox 4 and Internet Explorer 9. They write, 'The Associated Press (AP) is the first company to deploy DNT on a large scale, and it only took a few hours for one engineer to implement. The AP News Registry tracks 1 billion impressions of news content, with 175 million unique visitors per month, and has membership with more than 800 sites. When consumers send a DNT preference via the browser while viewing a story at one of its publisher's sites, the AP News Registry no longer sets any cookies. The previous solution was for users to opt-out via a link to a central opt-out page referenced in each participating news site's privacy policy. They still count the total number of impressions for each news story, but aggregate consumer data for those with DNT in a non-identifiable way.'"

Re:Non-identifiable?

[Richard_at_work]

They would store "someone visited page X at date Y and time Z" and they may also be able to store "and they were referred in from page ABC", but they would have no way of seeing where you went from that page, even if it was to another page on the site, because all that page is going to store is the same non-identifiable information.

A cookie allows them to give you a unique identifier, which works for differentiation down to individual browsers on the same machine, and that allows them to get a good picture of your travel around their site (and their affiliate sites etc) - the DNT flag would remove that, only allowing them to track the number of hits on a page and where the visitor came from.

They don't know its "you" each time, because the DNT flag contains no identifiable information - to them, this is the equivilent of you clearing out your cookies after each individual page visit. No cookie, no ID, no tracking beyond the current page. Same deal.