Online data

By Cooper Quintin for EFF. On August 3, EFF, Disconnect and a coalition of four (now five) other partners announced an implementation of “Do Not Track” (DNT) for Web browsing—this new policy standard, coupled with privacy software, will better protect users against sites that try to secretly follow and record their Internet activity. Trackers are blocked, while sites that adopt the DNT policy and respect users' privacy have their ads unblocked. This combination of deterrent and reward provides an incentive for advertisers and data collection companies to respect a user’s choice not to be tracked online, and encourages them to develop advertising technologies that do the same. The EFF and Disconnect’s partners in this launch are the innovative publishing site Medium, major analytics service Mixpanel, popular ad- and tracker-blocking extension AdBlock, and private search engine DuckDuckGo. Since the launch, the ad-tech company Adzerk has also joined. New partners have already signed up and will be announced in early 2016.