Standardising Tracking

Browser tracking has been the subject of a great deal of discussion lately with, Mozilla supporting a do not track header, Google enabling users to opt out of cookie storage via a plugin and us (Microsoft) including anti tracking technology.

It’s clear that tracking and privacy are pretty important for all the browser vendors and so it makes sense that all the browsers collaborate and pool resources to create a standard rather than pulling in a different direction. We therefore submitted a proposal to the W3C named Web Tracking Protection and last week it was acknowledged by the W3C.

This standard formalises two main technologies:

1. Filter lists- These prevent user agents from making requests to known Web servers that track users
2. A Do not track Preference – A user preference that is exposed both as an HTTP header and a DOM property.

On the 28th and 29th of April all the big wigs from Google, Microsoft, Vodafone, Mozilla PayPal, Apple, W3C, Yahoo and a ton of other companies will get together to discuss the issue further and from that hammer out how to get an industry consensus on the way we deal with tracking.

If you want to learn more about the tracking standard that Microsoft has submitted as a proposal to W3C then check out the IE blog.