The issue of marketers snooping on our browsing has received a good deal of attention this year. The EU has unveiled the ePrivacy Directive, a somewhat problematic piece of legislation which requires consent for online behavioural tracking, and Mozilla has come up with Do Not Track, a mechanism for telling companies that you do not wish to be monitored.
At present, Do Not Track is a browser setting that you can turn on to tell marketers not to track where you go on the web. It has caught on quite well, having been implemented in IE9 and Safari as well as Firefox, and Mozilla is working with the W3C to get it standardised.
The DNT header is of course just a request so it relies on the cooperation of the industry, and Mozilla has been working to build bridges. The AP News Registry has implemented DNT over 800 news sites, so users who have turned it on won’t get any cookies set by those sites. Also The Digital Advertising Alliance is looking at including DNT in its programme of self-regulation.
Now Mozilla is unveiling the Do Not Track Field Guide to help developers implement it on their sites. It includes case studies from an advertising company, a technology provider and media and software companies, as well as tutorials and code to make it straightforward to implement DNT.
You can download the document in PDF format by clicking the image on the Mozilla blog. Check the bottom of the post for a link to a zip of all the sample code, and you can also find the guide on the Mozilla Developer Network.
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