Twitter Announces Support for Do Not Track Technology, Implements It Immediately

Twitter recently announced that it is supporting “Do Not Track” and showed that support by immediately halting online tracking of users who trigger a setting in their browsers. The announcement was made by an official with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) during a Do Not Track (DNT) event that was hosted by Mozilla. Mozilla, who is behind the Firefox internet browser, has been a major supporter of the technology.

Twitter, on the other hand, kept its head down about the tech stating, “We applaud the FTC’s leadership on DNT” in a recent tweet from the company’s corporate account. According to Gartner research director Brian Blau, who specializes in consumer technology, “Twitter seems to be the one social network that’s doing the right thing [on privacy]. They’ve gone out of their way, compared to competitors, to stand up for users’ rights.”

DNT relies on information in the HTTP header to signal that the user does not want to be tracked by online advertisers and sites. If a website or service abides by DNT, then it must stop tracking users’ movements by discarding a Web cookie that handled the process. This is exactly what Twitter has done.

Twitter is actually the very first social service to support DNT, which was first endorsed by the FTC back in 2010. Mozilla also gave props to Twitter for supporting DNT. According to Alex Fowler, who leads privacy and public policies for Mozilla, “We’re excited that Twitter now supports Do Not Track.”

Mozilla was the first browser developer to support the tech when it implemented it into Firefox 4 back in March 2011. Since then, DNT has been in every single released version of Firefox. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 and Apple’s Safari have since added DNT as well and Google, who had long since resisted supporting DNT, finally caved in February and announced that it would add DNT to the Chrome browser this year.

Source: Computer World – Twitter jumps on Do Not Attack bandwagon

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