The Do Not Track setting, which was proposed in 2009 and added to all major browsers over the last few years, sends a notification to websites that requests they disable advertising and activity tracking.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has now announced a Do Not Track standard in partnership with privacy extensions Disconnect and Adblock, blogging platform Medium, private search engine DuckDuckGo and analytics service Mixpanel.
The new standard is a document that services are free to re-host on their own sites. It commits those supporting the Do Not Track feature to respecting users who opt-in and explains what data will be tracked by their services.
It also asks that those who adopt the standards to ensure any third party scripts such as advertisements, widgets or analytics are also held to the Do Not Track policy and don’t collect data on the user.
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Medium was the first to fully implement the standard and detects users with the feature enabled, then lets them know that the service is adhering to the request.
If you’re looking for an easy to understand explainer of the new standard, there’s also a version that explains each section.
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