The Wall Street Journal reports that Safari, following in the footsteps of Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer, will soon offer a new “do not track” feature that will enable users to opt out of tracking cookies which as you know is a time-old favorite of marketers and advertisers. The new feature is a part of the new Safari which will become available to the masses when Lion is released this Summer.
Conspicuously, yet not surprisingly, absent from the list of browsers with this feature is Google’s Chrome browser.
A spokesman for Google, which is a major player in online advertising, said the company “will continue to be involved closely” in industry discussions about do-not-track. In the meantime, he said Google offers an add-on program for Chrome that users can download called “Keep My Opt-Outs” that will let users request that their data not be used for targeted advertising.
While support for “Do Not Track” is available on developer previews of OS X Lion, the feature is not yet a part of the preferance pane but instead can be activated through the Develop contextual menu.
Thu, Apr 14, 2011
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