Mountain View, California — Potentially useful for anyone concerned of their privacy while online, Google silently jumped on the privacy bandwagon, attaching support for ‘Do Not Track’ feature into its latest Chrome over the weekend.
The news was initially reported by All Things Digital earlier this week, the development team behind Google Chrome has attached the ‘Do Not Track’ privacy feature in the most recent Canary version of the Web browser.
Going forward, the search giant and browser maker previously said it would enforce a viable solution to help prevent users’ actions from being tracked on the Web, and said it would have a solution out for Chrome and its advertising systems “by the end of the year.” While Google did made a commitment to launch support for the ‘Do Not Track’ initiative earlier this year, but the Chrome development team has been extremely sluggish in adding the feature to the browser.
According to the statement regarding the addition of the ‘Do Not Track’ feature within Chrome, Google director of global communications Rob Shilkin stated “We undertook to honor an agreement on DNT that the industry reached with the White House early this year. To that end we are making this setting visible in our Chromium developer channel, so that it will be available in upcoming versions of Chrome by year’s end.”
As a matter of fact, the option, which empowers users to opt out of Web tracking for the purpose of targeted advertising, is still a work in progress, as All Things D pointed out. But DNT support could be an important step for the fast-growing Chrome browser.
The Obama administration incorporated the new privacy rules in February, a year after a California congresswoman introduced the Do Not Track Me Online Act of 2011.
“Consumers have a right to choose what if any of their information is shared with big corporations and the federal government must have the authority and tools to enforce reasonable protections,” Rep. Jackie Speier, a Democrat, said last year in a statement about her bill.
Alternatively, Microsoft, Apple, and Mozilla have already added DNT support feature into Internet Explorer, Safari, and Firefox, respectively. In addition, Microsoft took the feature a step further and enabled the ‘Do Not Track’ function within Internet Explorer 10 without requiring the user to turn it on.
By enabling the “DNT: 1” option in the browser, websites and advertisers are indicating that the user does not want to be followed. The U.S. government has been stressing for more compliance, as is demonstrated by Google’s sudden DNT addition.
In order to activate the support in Chrome, users must go to Settings and then click the Advanced Settings link at the bottom of the page to open up the section that contains the ‘Do Not Track’ check box.
Additionally, as soon as the setting has been activated, the browser adds a section of code to the request header when loading up a new Web page. Assuming that the third-party site respects the user’s wishes regarding tracking and privacy, the site will stop tracking the user’s site usage. Also, site owners and advertisers will ultimately be responsible for halting all forms of tracking. Hypothetically, anyone expecting the setting to protect them from all forms of user tracking could be lulled into a false sense of security if third parties do not honor the setting at all.
Among other things, ‘Do Not Track’ is a feature — that is slowly making its way to Web browsers — to help users opt out of tracking cookies and targeted advertisements. But advertisers fear that the privacy setting would restrict companies’ efforts to target advertising more effectively to users’ tastes and would suffer as a result.
However, a Google spokesperson speaking to AllThingsD said: “We undertook to honor an agreement on DNT that the industry reached with the White House early this year. To that end we are making this setting visible in our Chromium developer channel, so that it will be available in upcoming versions of Chrome by year’s end.”