The brief of America's Federal Trade Commission (FTC) does not typicallyextend to its wards' cone crushercorporate communications. That did not stop Ed Felten, the FTC's technologychief, from breaking the news that Twitter was jumping on the "Do Not Track"(DNT) bandwagon, a move the firm later confirmed—in a tweet, naturally. Themicroblogging giant is the latest to let a user specify in a web browser that hedoes not wish his behaviour to be followed and used for targeted advertising orassembling personal profiles.
The FTC has its nose in DNT because thedirective needs regulatory enforcement and civil liability to be workable. ChrisSoghoian, a former FTC staffer who helped come up with DNT and shepherd it attimes, explains that advertisers' explicit agreement to respect users' wishesmeans that the FTC can pursue those who nonetheless disregard them for"deceptive practices", which falls under the agency's purview. Individuals,meanwhile, have a contractual basis on which to sue companies which renege ontheir word.
Technically, DNT is a bit of text which reads "DNT: 1" (where "1" stands for"on" and "0" would mean "off"). This is sent as web metadata, part of the hiddenmessages that a web browser and web server exchange when negotiating to receivea page or media file. When a switch in an internet browser's options is flippedto "do not track", companies like Twitter that have signed up to the pledge willno longer record information about a visitor's behaviour when the user employsthat browser.
The DNT switch has already been included in Mozilla's Firefoxand Microsoft's Internet Explorer, while Apple hides the option in its Safaribrowser among software developer features. Google's Chrome has a downloadableplug-in to enable DNT that will be built into future versions of the software.Another popular browser, Opera, has the option in its current beta version.These five companies' desktop browsers account for nearly all computer surfing(mobile browsers lag in this regard). An independent site run by privacy andsecurity researchers, called donottrack.us, explains how to flip the switch ineach of them. In Firefox, for instance, the setting is labeled "Tell websites Ido not want to be tracked" and the default option is off. Mozilla says 9% ofdesktop Firefox users and 19% of its mobile jaw crusherplant surfers have checked the box (while noting that it "does not collect orstore personal information about our users to determine these statistics").