Google enables Do Not Track in Chrome

The latest development version of Chrome includes the DNT option under "Show advanced settings..." in the browser's options

Google has implemented the Do Not Track (DNT) header in its Chrome web browser. The move comes after the company had agreed to the White House's Consumer Privacy Bill in February, promising to respect DNT headers set by visitors to its web site.

The Do Not Track mechanism, which was originally proposed by Mozilla, has garnered support from all major browser makers and a majority of the technology industry. DNT is designed to allow users to opt out of the behavioural tracking that many online advertising companies (Google being one of the biggest) use to identify users and serve them custom-tailored advertising. Firefox was one of the first browsers to implement DNT and Microsoft's Internet Explorer supports it as well.

Users who want to take advantage of the new DNT capabilities in Chrome will have to install the latest "bleeding edge" developer build in the form of the Chrome Canary branch. However, this version is not recommended for use in production environments. Users who are running a stable version of the browser will have to wait some months for the feature to arrive in the mainstream version.

See also:

• Apache ignores Internet Explorer 10's do-not-track header, a report from The H.

(fab)