14 DAY TRIAL // The California governor has signed a bill requiring companies to disclose if they abide by the Do Not Track provisions or not.
Jerry Brown signed AB 370, requiring Internet companies that collect personal information to declare how they respond to the Do Not Track requests. This should push advertising networks belonging to companies such as Google and Facebook to increase transparency about how they track the users’ activity on the Internet.
Discussions about the Do Not Track standard have been going on for a while and its future has been questioned lately after the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) missed multiple deadlines to create a final proposal to be sent for review to the Federal Trade Commission and Congress.
Mozilla has already integrated a feature in Firefox, which enables users to state whether they want sites like Google, Twitter or Facebook to track their online activities to better target advertising. Google, Microsoft and Apple built similar features into their browsers later on.
However, sites are free to ignore the Do Not Track requests without even having to let users know.
The new bill should change the way companies act towards these requests by making the entire process more transparent.
The AB 370 is likely to become a national law, despite it being limited to California for now. Since companies would most likely state they support Do Not Track and since they’ll most likely hate having to create privacy policies for each individual state, the changes could go national in a very short period of time.
Considering the discussions around Internet security and privacy have intensified over the past several months, particularly after the NSA scandal broke through, the new decision was bound to be taken sooner rather than later.