Yahoo will ignore Do Not Track in Internet Explorer 10

Back in 2009, Microsoft announced support for the Do Not Track technology in Internet Explorer 9. This is an HTTP header that requires a web application to disable tracking of specific user actions. Soon after, DNT support was added to their browsers by Mozilla, Apple and Opera.

In the 10th version of Internet Explorer, Microsoft decided to enable DNT by default. According to SlashGear, Yahoo did not like this move, and yesterday the company released a statement that it would ignore the DNT signal in Internet Explorer 10.

Yahoo said that the DNT standard has not yet been finalized, and that Microsoft’s solution “worsens the interaction for most users and makes it more difficult to provide them with our value proposition.”
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Yahoo’s statement says the company “supports Do Not Track in principle,” but believes that “DNT should be in line with the user's intentions — not just the creator of the browser, the author of the plugin, or a third-party program.”

The Verge notes that the Apache developers have previously made a similar decision to ignore DNT in IE10. Then the co-founder of Apache, who himself was engaged in the DNT specification, explained that DNT, by definition, must be an option that the user chooses consciously.