Mozilla and W3C get to work on Tracking Protection

The W3C has created a Tracking Protection Working Group as part of its work to create standards for ways to allow users to say that they do not want to be tracked. Meanwhile, Mozilla are pushing forward with their Do Not Track (DNT) efforts with the publication of the first edition of "The Do Not Track Field Guide", a collection of case studies, tutorials, sample code and background material on DNT and the debates around it. The field guide is also available as HTML.

The field guide will be one of the set of "input documents" for the W3C's new working group, which also includes Microsoft's Web Tracking Protection submission to the W3C from February this year, the FTC staff report and guidelines, and the EFF commentary on tracking. The group itself is looking for broad-based participation and is to be led by two co-chairs: the first announced being Aleecia M. McDonald who recently joined Mozilla as Senior Privacy Researcher, the other chair is still to be announced. The W3C working group plans to have its first telephone meeting on 14 September and a first face-to-face meeting on 21-22 September.

Mozilla's analytics team have also been breaking down the statistics for Do Not Track adoption (and working out how to calculate adoption without self-defeatingly tracking users). They estimate that just under five per cent of Firefox users have now turned on the "Do Not Track" mechanism within the browser.

(djwm)