Mozilla’s Do Not Track feature, which allows users to tell websites that they would like to opt-out of being tracked by third parties, is starting to gain some traction among both users and publishers. According to new data shared by Mozilla today, 8.6% of Firefox desktop users and 19% of mobile users now turn this opt-in feature on. The latest company to announce that it will honor Do Not Track is Twitter.
As Do Not Track isn’t so much a technical solution that just blocks tracking cookies and more like a gentlemen’s agreement between sites and their users, its success completely depends on being supported by publishers and developers.
As for the major browser developers, Microsoft and Apple are already on board (and IE9, it is worth noting, already offers a somewhat more aggressive “tracking protection” tool). Google, too, plans to support Do Not Track later this year and Opera is building it into its upcoming Opera 12 release.
A number of major online companies, including our parent company AOL, as well as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have already pledged support for Do Not Track. For Twitter, which doesn’t rely on tracking and third-party advertising as much as other sites, pledging support for Do Not Track was probably not a very hard decision.
The Federal Trade Commission’s CTO, Ed Felten, just mentioned Twitter now supports Do Not Track. We applaud the FTC’s leadership on DNT.
— Twitter (@twitter) May 17, 2012