Mozilla outlines Firefox 'do-not-track' tool

[javajolt]

NEWS Mozilla, acting on a US Federal Trade Commission proposal, has offered a detailed mechanism by which Firefox and other web browsers could prevent web pages from tracking people's online behavior for advertising purposes.

With Mozilla's do-not-track technology, network data packets from the browser would signal to a website that a person does not wished to be tracked. The difficult part of the plan comes in trying to get website operators to co-operate.

Alex Fowler, Mozilla's global privacy and public policy leader, said that with the mechanism, the browser would alert a website during basic communications that use the web's Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). He also acknowledged that getting websites to co-operate is a crucial difficulty in getting the system to work.

The FTC proposed a Do Not Track mechanism last year (click for PDF).