Everything you need to know about Do Not Track: Microsoft vs. Google and Mozilla

Do Not Track ( DNT ) is an HTTP header that allows you to bypass the tracking of your actions by sites. It sounds simple and that is how it was intended, but in its short history the situation around this simple standard has become terribly complex.

The DNT currently takes three values: 1 means that the user does not want to be tracked, 0 means that the user agrees to be tracked, and null (default) means that the user has not expressed preferences.
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You've probably heard a lot about DNT lately. In the end, Google Chrome just recently added support for it in version 23, which was big news because now all five major browsers support the standard.

This is good, isn't it? Definitely yes. However, this is hardly the end of the story - in fact, this is only the beginning. So: everything you need to know about DNT.

How did it all start?

Let's start from the beginning. Although the DNT caused quite a stir in the last few months, its history began five years ago. This may seem like a short time, but for the Internet it is quite a lot. Suffice it to say that five years ago, Google Chrome did not even exist.

So, 2007. Human rights advocates require the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to create a “do not track me” list for online advertising, like the Do Not Call Registry , which has also appeared in the news lately due to the fact that it was not very effective. The proposal sounded like this: Internet advertisers must submit their information to the Federal Trade Commission, which then must compile a list of their domains that track users, mainly through cookies.

However, for two years nothing substantial happened. So far in July 2009, researcher Christopher Sogoyan and Mozilla engineer Sid Stamm did not create a prototype add-on for Firefox, which first implemented the DNT header. However, it was just a test, and nothing suggested that Firefox would include this prototype in the browser.

However, in July 2010, FTC Chairman John Leibovitz during a confidentiality hearing announced to the US Senate Trade Committee that the commission was studying the idea. In December 2010, Leibovitz released a confidentiality report that called for the development of such a system to enable people to avoid control over their actions on the Internet.

Just five days later, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer 9 would support Tracking Protection Lists, which block user tracking using blacklists provided by third parties. It looked like the company was ahead of Mozilla, but in January 2011, Mozilla announced that Do Not Track would also appear in Firefox, and released an update for its browser before IE9 came out. Opera made a similar announcement in February 2011, and Apple’s Safari support for DNT appeared in April 2011. Opera added support this month, as did Google Chrome.

What is the situation now?

However, the really interesting situation began to develop only this year. In May 2010, Twitter announced that it would support DNT in all major browsers.

In June 2012, Microsoft announced that the DNT feature would be enabled by default in Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8 (in the express settings that appears when you first start the browser). The company explained this decision by its commitment to user privacy.

From that moment on, the situation became more complicated. Microsoft has been heavily criticized, mainly by the advertising industry. Marketing firms have stated that the use of the DNT header should be a conscious choice of the user and therefore the function should not be enabled by default. Mozilla agreed with this point of view, and so did Google.

The main argument is that the decision violates the agreement of the Digital Advertising Alliance with the US government, since the alliance initially stipulated that it accepts the DNT system if it is not enabled by default in browsers. Microsoft claims that users prefer to have a default DNT browser.

In September 2012, DNT author Roy Fielding wrote in the Apache HTTP Server code to ignore any use of the DNT header by IE10 users. In October 2012, Yahoo also announced that it would ignore DNT requests from IE10.

Where are we going?

Microsoft is moving forward with IE10, but we no longer live at a time when IE decides everything. Of course, IE10 comes with every computer sold on Windows 8, but that’s all. Windows 7 will eventually get IE10, but this will not happen so soon. The likelihood that Windows users will install Chrome or Firefox is higher than ever before.

Unless Mozilla and Google do the same, the DNT is unlikely to take off. And this is unlikely to happen, because Google and Mozilla get most of their money from advertising. 96% of Google’s revenue in 2011 came from advertising, and 85% of royalties in 2011 was received from Google by Mozilla. Therefore, worsening conditions for advertisers is not exactly what Google and Mozilla will want to do.

However, the hope remains, after all the DNT has gone a long way over the past few years. Google has the least hope of switching the default DNT values, but Mozilla may be under pressure from users, and Opera, as a rule, plays to increase its small client base. In addition, Microsoft can find an ally in the same company with which it is increasingly cooperating recently: Apple.

Safari has a small share on the desktop, but rather a significant share in the mobile market, so you can just wait and see how Apple treats the privacy of its users.