Yahoo, one of the first implementers of Do Not Track (DNT) has backed out of using the technology and DNT settings are no longer enabled on Yahoo.
“As the first major tech company to implement ‘do not track,’ we’ve been at the heart of conversations surrounding how to develop the most user-friendly standard,” Yahoo stated in a blog post. “However, we have yet to see a single standard emerge that is effective, easy to use and has been adopted by the broader tech industry.”
At its most basic level, DNT can be integrated within a Web browser that enables a user to choose whether they want to be tracked by a Website. That tracking could include cookies that are used to help identify a user and their browsing activities. On the Web server side, a given Website needs to respect the DNT setting from the browser.
As noted by Yahoo, one of the challenges with DNT is the lack of a true standard implementation across all browsers. In an October 2013 blog post, Microsoft Chief Privacy Officer Brendon Lynch outlined some of the challenges of a common standard. Lynch noted that a common DNT standard is, in fact, now being hammered out in the W3C’s Tracking Protection Working Group effort.
Read the full story at eWEEK:
Yahoo Backs Away From ‘Do Not Track’ Despite Its Promise
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.