14 DAY TRIAL // A week after proposing a Do-Not-Track HTTP header, Mozilla has already implemented a working version in the latest Firefox development builds.
"My colleague, Sid Stamm, Mozilla’s privacy engineer announced this morning that we have uploaded working prototypes of our Do Not Track HTTP header in nightly builds (pre-beta versions of Firefox)," Alex Fowler, Mozilla's leader for global privacy and public policy, wrote on his blog.
"Anyone interested in testing it out can download one of these versions and see how we are implementing the header," he added.
The implementation is the result of a collaboration between Mozilla and Stanford's DoNotTrack.Us project, which already had an HTTP header proposal for this option.
An uniform cross-browser Do-Not-Track privacy setting was proposed by the Federal Trade Commission in a report last year.
The DoNotTrack.Us HTTP header was of the form "X-Do-Not-Track," but after recent talks with Mozilla, it was changed to the much shorter "DNT: 1."
HTTP headers refer to pieces of information sent along by the browser with every request. This means that by itself "DNT: 1" will not stop behavioral tracking.
It just serves as a sign to let websites know the user does not wishes to be tracked, but the choice of respecting that wish falls with the advertisers themselves.
For the moment, the feature can be enabled from the Advanced tab in the Firefox Options dialog, but it will ultimately be moved under the Privacy tab.
"It pains me that it’s not under the 'Privacy' panel, yet. This reflects our desire for speed in getting the feature into Firefox, as updating the 'Privacy' UI and content will require additional engineering bandwidth," Fowler explained.
"We’ll have more to say on this once we move the new feature into upcoming beta releases," he added.