Wrangling Over ‘Do Not Track’

After nearly two years of negotiations over how to put in effect a standardized “Do Not Track” mechanism for online users, Apple, Microsoft and Mozilla, along with some consumer and privacy groups, have lined up against the online advertising industry.

The parties have been wrangling over how to provide a uniform option, called Do Not Track, that would allow individuals to opt out of having information about their online actions collected, retained and analyzed for purposes – like ads tailored to user behavior – not directly related to their activities. Browsers including Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox already include such Do Not Track options for users. Until the ad industry, technology firms and advocacy groups come to an agreement, however, the don’t-track-me browser settings represent little more than symbolic consumer flags that companies are free to ignore. An international Web standards body called the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, is overseeing the working group that has been trying to reach a consensus on the mechanism. But last week, a variety of participants rejected a last-minute proposal spearheaded by the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA), an industry self-regulatory body, that would have defined the Do Not Track option as prohibiting ad networks from retaining the URLs of the sites a user visited, but permitting the categorization or scoring of users based on their browsing activities.