Yahoo to launch "Do Not Track" privacy soon!

The issue of Internet privacy and browser tracking in particular contributes to the top headlines in the tech press every few months. The latest stint of privacy and tracking news frame newly released best-practice guidelines from the FTC, which are intended to give consumers greater control over the collection and use of their personal data. IE9 followed by Mozilla gave complete control over their personal data to their users by already providing the Do Not Track service last year. To compete with them, Yahoo has recently announced that it will soon support the Do Not Track privacy header across its extensive network of websites which means you will soon be able to easily tell Yahoo to stop tracking your movements around the web!

Advertisers’ use such tools for behavioral advertising, which is a common practice on the web. They happen to use cookies to track your clicks, monitor which sites you visit, what you buy and even, in the case of mobile browsers, where you go. Often the sites tracking you are not just the sites you have actually visited, but the third-party sites running ads on those pages. So they sometimes trap you indirectly. The Do Not Track System offers a way to elect out of this third-party web tracking much like the way as Do Not Call registry service.

The Do Not Track header originated life at Mozilla, but since it has moved to the W3C where it was converted into a web standard by the Tracking Protection Working Group. It now works in almost every major desktop browser except Google Chrome, yet none of them turn it on by default. Still, for privacy-concerned users it is good enough and practical to enable it, since the header offers a rapid and cool way to tell the advertisers that you don’t want to be followed while you browse the web.

Do Not Track header is being respected by several online advertising groups already and hence they refrain from tracking users that enable it. Yahoo’s announcement means that, you can add Yahoo to the list of browsers that will stop tracking you if you have enabled Do Not Track in your web browser. I think the company is starting the service this summer.