You can ask your web browser to send “Do Not Track” requests to the websites you visit, but this doesn’t really do anything of substance. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) wants to change this, however, and has joined forces with a coalition of companies and privacy experts to introduce a newer, stronger “Do Not Track” standard, although it hasn’t explained what makes this standard stronger than what’s currently being used. As for the coalition, the partners include names like AdBlock, Disconnect, DuckDuckGo, Medium, and more.
Unless you take some fairly serious steps to guard your privacy, at least some of your web browsing each day is being tracked. We promise. Advertisers stand to make big bucks by learning as much as possible about our browsing habits, and precious little can stop them. In fact, as we learned several years ago, webgoers can’t even use the “Do Not Track” setting available in popular browsers to guard their privacy, because many advertisers still secretly track users either way. Useless though “Do Not Track” may be, don’t despair. While virtual private networks might be the safest way to browse today, the protectors of the Internet over at the Electronic Frontier Foundation have announced the creation of a new, more effective Do Not Track feature that will actually stop advertisers from spying on people without their knowledge. Together with the online privacy experts at Disconnect and a coalition of companies dedicated to improving privacy on the web, the EFF has created a stronger Do Not Track standard. According to the group, the new standard not only provides better protection against advertisers that secretly track people as they browse the web, but also incentivize advertisers to stop spying on users all together.
