Do Not Track 2.0

[Commentary] Earlier during the week of July 13, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced another major milestone in the standardization of Do Not Track. Most notably, the technical mechanism will soon be certified for widespread implementation. While this progress is noteworthy, it’s also important to recognize that the W3C’s Do-Not-Track work has changed a lot in recent years.

When Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz called for the deployment of Do Not Track nearly five years ago, the major web browsers acted quickly to allow users to set persistent Do-Not-Track instructions that would be broadcast to all sites the user visited. The advertising industry was initially reluctant to engage with the issue -- pointing instead to the deployment of the AdChoices program. However, in February 2012, at a White House event to announce the President’s Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, the Digital Advertising Alliance ultimately committed to honoring Do-Not-Track signals within a year. Ultimately, that never happened. However, while industry as a whole is currently not willing to voluntarily honor Do Not Track, there is reason to think that that incentives may change over time. Ultimately, two threats might force compliance with user preferences: the increasing deployment of tracker blocking and the potential for data protection regulators enforcing users’ rights to opt out of data processing.

[Justin Brookman is the Chair of the World Wide Web Consortium's Tracking Protection Group]