Online media giant Yahoo! has announced that it will not honour Do Not Track (DNT) requests from Microsoft Internet Explorer users.
DNT is a proposed standard for notifying websites that users do not wish to be tracked for analytics purposes. By switching on a DNT setting in their web browser, a request is automatically sent from the user to the website asking it not to store any tracking data about the user’s visit.
In a media release titled “In support of a personalised user experience”, the company states:
“Yahoo! has been working with our partners in the Internet industry to come up with a standard that allows users to opt out of certain website analytics and ad targeting. In principle, we support Do Not Track (DNT).”
“Unfortunately, because discussions have not yet resulted in a final standard for how to implement DNT, the current DNT signal can easily be abused.”
Yahoo! views Microsoft’s recent decision to enable DNT in Internet Explorer 10 by default as an example of the “abuse” of the proposed standard.
“Recently, Microsoft unilaterally decided to turn on DNT in Internet Explorer 10 by default, rather than at users’ direction. In our view, this degrades the experience for the majority of users and makes it hard to deliver on our value proposition to them. It basically means that the DNT signal from IE10 doesn’t express user intent.”
“Ultimately, we believe that DNT must map to user intent — not to the intent of one browser creator, plug-in writer, or third-party software service.” “Therefore, although Yahoo! will continue to offer Ad Interest Manager and other tools, we will not recognize IE10’s default DNT signal on Yahoo! properties at this time.”
Andrew Sadauskas is a former journalist at SmartCompany and a former editor of TechCompany.
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