01 March 2012, 17:08

Mozilla proposes Do Not Track at OS level on mobile devices

Mozilla's three-state Do Not Track mockup

Alex Fowler, privacy and public policy spokesperson for Mozilla, has laid out plans for a next generation Do Not Track proposal to be implemented by mobile operating systems. According to Fowler, privacy settings need to be controlled on an OS level to ensure that every third party application on a user's device respects their Do Not Track choice. Mozilla has already demonstrated an implementation of this idea at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, built into their Boot to Gecko project.

Furthermore, Mozilla is working on a three-state Do Not Track system as the current binary on/off switch "doesn’t fit well with laws in Europe" says Fowler. The new system, which is being developed together with the W3C Tracking Protection Group, will therefore implement a "no preference" setting as well. Mozilla hopes that other mobile OS makers will follow their lead with these two steps, as browser vendors are doing with Firefox's original Do Not Track implementation on desktop computers.

(fab)

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