DNT has been a hot topic bringing forth industry response and attracting the attention of everyone from privacy advocates to the FTC to elected officials on Capitol Hill who have held numerous privacy hearings hoping to get a privacy bill passed some time in the near future. Browsers such as Mozilla, Microsoft, Google, and Opera are in the process of incorporating DNT mechanisms into the design of their browsers. Each browser varies in how they approach a DNT request by a user. In an effort to establish clear and flexible guidelines for a DNT feature, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Tracking Protection Working Group has been working rather diligently on how DNT should be implemented, addressing key issues such as defining “tracking” for the purposes of DNT.
FPF is a member of the W3C multi-stakeholder group with a range of people from companies such as Adobe, Apple, Deutsche Telekom AG, Google, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, Stanford University, The Center of Democracy and Technology, The Nielsen Company, TRUSTe, W3C, and Yahoo!. Also participating as invited experts, are representatives from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Consumer Watchdog, the German Independent Center for Privacy Protection (ULD), and Leiden University. The final standards will be released in 2012.