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.'"

Non-identifiable?

[JeffSh]

"but aggregate consumer data for those with DNT in a non-identifiable way.'"

hmm. Haven't we had many stories about how "non-identifiable" is still identifiable in some cases? It sounds like "Do Not Track" may mean actually "Might track less". As with all voluntary things though, the implementation is completely up to the company implementing it. There's no reason for them to do anything different. I might think it would even allow another layer of tracking since if you have "DNT" on then all that means is yet another flag could be used as a unique identifier, and now they can infer that you're tech savvy and paranoid enough to flip that flag.. What is the point of this again?

This is nice but the obvious remains...

[alostpacket]

What good is a privacy feature when it rests on the compliance of those who have conflicted interests in the matter? I'm scratching my head a bit as to why Mozilla went down this road at all. I know everyone is pushing for the Web-2.0-cloud-service-based-thin-client-web-app-with-local-storage and video embeded in buttons, but there has to be some kind of gatekeeper. If our gatekeepers (the browser makers/W3C) are merely going to add a "please be nice" button, what chances are there that the web will continue to be a medium of information excahnge, and not turn into a see of potentially dangerous apps? I know that's a bit chicken little sounding but this was one advantage the plugin model afforded. Don't want Flash/Java? Easily blocked. Don't want HTML privacy invasion? Ask the advertisers nicely to comply? Something seems seriously broken with this philosophy. It's arleady diffucult to browse a lot of sites sans-javascript, and it seems only to be getting worse. Personally, I've always thought one of the advantages of the web, one of the things that caused it to grow so rapidly, is that sites were sanboxed away from the user via the limitations of the browser.

Re:Sorry, too late.

[maxume]

I can convince my family to enable do not track, no way am I going to try to walk them through cookie white listing.

Re:This is nice but the obvious remains...

[BJ_Covert_Action]

I'm scratching my head a bit as to why Mozilla went down this road at all.

Well it seems like a bit of a publicity ploy for Mozilla to me, albeit, a good one. Mozilla has had issues with FF in recent versions (I'm looking at you FF3 bloat), but it still remains the poster child browser for a private/independent/free browser. I think the devs at Mozilla know full well that the Do Not Track flag requires the unlikely compliance from other entities. However, by making the feature easy to use and by publicizing it, it has brought the problem of, "Random data mining companies are harvesting everything about you," right into the main view of every user that configures their own Option settings in FF.

Furthermore, if users start checking the option because it sounds like a good idea, but there is still a big fuss about companies tracking users anyway, the users will start to ask what the hell is going on. If Mozilla takes the time to explain that, for true non-tracking web-browsing, those data mining companies have to take it down a notch, it could very well increase public criticism of data mining in general.

So all in all, I think adding the "Do Not Track" option was much more of a political move by Mozilla than an actual technical one. It's nice to see someone with money and clout sticking up for such things for once.