Mozilla Unveils Do-Not-Track Tool For Improved Online Privacy

Mozilla, acting on a U.S. 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 Web site that a person doesn't wished to be tracked. Then comes the tricky part: getting Web site operators to cooperate.

Alex Fowler, Mozilla's global privacy and public policy leader, said that with the mechanism, the browser would alert a Web site during basic communications that use the Web's Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). He also acknowledged that getting Web sites to cooperate is a crucial difficulty in getting the system to work:

The link for this article located at CNET is no longer available.