Microsoft's forthcoming Internet Explorer 10 will ship with the Do Not Track (DNT) option turned on by default, an announcement that has drawn praise from privacy advocates, and condemnation from advertisers.
First introduced in IE 9 as a response to the Federal Trade Commission's request that online advertising be more uniform (though Mozilla's Firefox was the first web browser to use DNT), and that consumers have more choice over how their information is shared with advertisers, DNT is a function that tells websites not to collect or use any information pertaining to their visit, and/or share that information with advertisers.
In IE 9 however, the function was disabled by default. Now, Microsoft has made the decision to enable the function by default instead, a move the advertising industry sees as a slap in the face. The Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) declared that Microsoft has acted unilaterally in their decision, and undermined 3 years of negotiations that sought to maintain user's privacy to the utmost, while avoiding the use of having DNT signals in web browsers turned on by default.
Many advertisers bristled at the notion of DNT signals from the start, and refused to honor them, though the DAA had agreed to honor DNT signals so long as they were not turned on by default in Web browsers. Those halcyon days for the advertising industry appear to be coming to an end, and while many have valid concerns about how this news might affect the multi-billion dollar internet advertising industry, others see it as the right move, and long overdue.
Still, the fact that DNT signals can effectively by ignored by advertisers if they so choose, without any real consequences at present, shows just how murky the situation remains, and that there is more work to be done by both sides of the divide to reach a more amiable common ground; one that is fair to consumers, with an eye on the protection of their privacy, while inspiring the advertising industry to comply with it.
