That's in the US; globally, the figure is slightly above 11 percent

May 7, 2013 08:50 GMT  ·  By

Do Not Track's fate is still up in the air. While major browsers have already adopted the technology, the problem is in actually getting advertisers to respect Do Not Track settings.

Progress on that front has been slow, mostly due to Microsoft's decision to deviate from the standard and implement the feature as it saw fit, with no discussions with stakeholders.

Still, Mozilla is keen to point out that there's clear user interest in Do Not Track, or something of the sort. At this point, 17 percent of US Firefox users have turned on Do Not Track, despite being an optional feature which hasn't exactly been advertised.

Mozilla is actually launching a new Do Not Track Dashboard that showcases usage in the US and globally over time and on the map.

Adoption is highest in the US, as the average is at 17 percent of Firefox installs. Globally, the figure is slightly above 11 percent.

"Based on these percentages, we estimate that our users send more than 135 million DNT signals every day — more than four trillion DNT signals every month," Mozilla explains.

This is the first time Mozilla has made this data public, but it will continue to update the Do Not Track Dashboard as new data comes in.

Mozilla gets this data much like any website owner would. Once per day, Firefox checks for the latest version of the add-on blacklist, to keep users protected.

The browser sends the DNT header option for each of these checks, which is how Mozilla is able to get the aggregated data. No other info is stored or tracked.

The hope is that the numbers will show that there's clear interest in the feature from the users. It's a smart move from Mozilla; it wants DNT or something like DNT to come to fruition and its data puts pressure on advertisers to come up with a solution before politicians get involved.