As online privacy issues continue to pop up in the news, Firefox has officially joined the battle to make our browsing activities a secret from ad providers and malicious web trackers.

“Technology that supports something like a ‘Do Not Track’ button is needed and we will deliver in the first part of next year,” Mozilla chief executive Gary Kovacs said. “The user needs to be in control.”

Most websites, particularly those supported by advertising platforms, use tracking technology in your browser’s history to personalize both your experience as well as the type of ads that are presented to you. Ad providers such as Google believe that these privacy concerns may be overblown.

“The idea of ‘Do Not Track’ is interesting, but there doesn’t seem to be consensus on what ‘tracking’ really means, nor how new proposals could be implemented in a way that respects people’s current privacy controls,” Google said in a statement.

Internet Explorer 9 is also planning on having manually established privacy controls in 2011. Chrome and Safari have not made a statement on the issue, but there is a Chrome extension that claims to solve the problem.