W3C Proposes Unified "Do Not Track" Privacy Standard

In his first submission, kierny writes "A W3C working group is crafting two standards, due out by summer 2012, to enable consumers to opt out of online tracking. Numerous big players are involved, including Google, Facebook, IBM, Mozilla, Microsoft, plus the Center for Democracy and Technology, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Federal Trade Commission. The first standard is Tracking Preference Expression, 'to define a standard for a how a browser can tell a website that a user wants more privacy,' says W3C working group co-chairman Dr. Matthias Schunter of IBM Research. 'So you send a signal, and you get a response from the website which tells you that the request has been honored.' The second standard, meanwhile, is the Tracking Compliance and Scope Specification, which details how websites should comply with Do Not Track preferences. But, don't expect Do Not Track to be active by default."

Re:Noble ambition

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously don't realize that it was Microsoft who first submitted a Do Not Track proposal to the W3C, earlier this year.

http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/microsoft-submits-tracking-protection-proposal-w3c-022511
http://www.w3.org/Submission/2011/SUBM-web-tracking-protection-20110224/

The Microsoft specification/method doesn't require to cooperation of publishers and doesn't rely on the behaving properly - unlike the methods implemented in Firefox and Chrome do, which therefore are practically useless against ill-behaving advertisers who do not honor the user's wishes regarding privacy.

Re:Noble ambition

[TheRaven64]

Exactly. In this case, Microsoft's incentives line up with the general public's, so there's a good chance that their standard will do what we actually want. FireFox and Chrome get most of their funding from Google, so they've got an incentive to appear to be acting in consumers' favour without actually making tracking too difficult. Apple probably just doesn't care - Safari isn't a profit centre for them.