For journalists, following AP style is a matter of religion. AP is now getting religion of its own by adopting Mozilla’s Do Not Track (DNT) approach.
Mozilla’s DNT is a binary expression of interest, (either a 1 or 0 in the header) that is setup by a Firefox user to let advertisers know that they want (or don’t want) to be tracked.
The catch with the system is that it also relies on advertisers to support the approach.
According to Mozilla, the AP News Registry
service, run by the Associated Press has implemented the DNT header across
800 news sites servicing 175 million unique visitors each month.
“The Associated Press (AP) is the first company to deploy DNT on a large
scale, and it only took a few hours for one engineer to implement,” Mozilla’s Alex Fowler wrote in a blog post. “When consumers send a DNT preference via the browser while
viewing a story at one of its publisher’s sites, the AP News Registry
no longer sets any cookies.”
That’s a huge deal, BUT there is still more work to be done.