Apple Prepares 'Do Not Track' Feature in Safari

From PC World: Future versions of Apple's Safari browser may contain a "Do Not Track" feature that stops advertisers from following users around the Web.

Safari's Do Not Track feature has already appeared in the test release of Mac OS X Lion, the Wall Street Journal reports. Lion launches this summer, but it's not clear whether Safari will get the feature sooner, or whether it'll be available to Windows users.

The tracking of behavior on the Web has become a heated topic. After a series of Wall Street Journal articles described how advertisers follow users across the Web and build targeted ad profiles, Mozilla added a Do Not Track feature to Firefox 4, and Microsoft added Tracking Protection to Internet Explorer 9. This week, Senators John Kerry and John McCain introduced a bill that would require companies to let users opt out of sharing personal information.

But the notion of Do Not Track is interpreted differently by the browsers that currently use it, and the Journal doesn't say whether Safari's version uses the Do Not Track standard from Stanford University, or some other implementation. Here's a rundown of how other browsers work:

Firefox's Do Not Track feature, found in the browser's preferences menu, uses an http header to tell websites that the user doesn't want to be tracked. The idea is for Web developers to build the appropriate response into their sites, something that's not going to happen overnight but could be useful in the long run. This is an implementation of Stanford University's Do Not Track standard.

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