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Internet Giants To Honor the 'No' In 'No Tracking'
theodp writes "The WSJ reports that a coalition of Internet giants including Google has agreed to support a do-not-track button to be embedded in most Web browsers — a move that the industry had been resisting for more than a year. The new do-not-track button isn't going to stop all Web tracking. The companies have agreed to stop using the data about people's Web browsing habits to customize ads, and have agreed not to use the data for employment, credit, health-care or insurance purposes. But the data can still be used for some purposes such as 'market research' and 'product development' and can still be obtained by law enforcement officers. Meanwhile, after Google got caught last week bypassing privacy settings on Safari, and was accused of also circumventing IE's P3P Privacy Protection feature, CBS MoneyWatch contacted Mozilla to see if it had noticed Google bypassing Firefox's privacy controls. After reports that Google ponied up close to a billion dollars to Mozilla to beat out a Microsoft bid, this seems to be one of those have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife type questions that has no good answer. Anyway, according to a statement attributed to Alex Fowler, global privacy and public policy lead for Mozilla: 'Our testing did not reveal any instances of Google bypassing user privacy settings.'"
No, They provide the choice to the user.
Presenting a choice to the user is not the same as providing a choice to the user.
Presenting would imply that you see a dialog box at launch asking you to decide what you want, they show you, they present you, and they don't just stash it away in a preference window without even telling you it is now there. Sure, its not hard to find, but how is the (common) user supposed to know what new options made it into their browser since they first installed it, or even at the time they installed it?
This is an important enough setting to actually request the user a forced decision on first availability or first configuration (or at next update if the user never manually configured it in the past.)