Twitter jumps on Do Not Track bandwagon

Twitter yesterday announced support for “Do Not Track,” immediately implementing it to halt online tracking of users who trigger a setting in their browsers.

The announcement was made by an official with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) during a Do Not Track (DNT) event hosted by Mozilla, the maker of Firefox. Mozilla has been a major proponent of the technology.

Twitter itself kept a low profile, saying only, “We applaud the FTC’s leadership on DNT,” Twitter tweeted from its own corporate account on Thursday.

“Twitter seems to be the one social network that’s doing the right thing [on privacy], said Brian Blau, a Gartner research director who specializes in consumer technology. “They’ve gone out of their way, compared to competitors, to stand up for users’ rights.”

Do Not Track relies on information in the HTTP header, part of the requests and responses sent and received by a browser as it communicates with a website, to signal that the user does not want to be tracked by online advertisers and sites. If a website or service abides by Do Not Track, it must stop tracking users’ movements, usually by discarding a Web cookie that handled the chore.

Twitter did exactly that, according to Jonathan Mayer, one of the two Stanford University researchers who came up with the HTTP header standard.

“It appears Twitter drops its ‘pid’ cookie (presumably [for] profile ID) when DNT is on,” Mayer said yesterday, ironically on Twitter.

Twitter is the first social service to support Do Not Track, the initiative that was first endorsed by the FTC in late 2010.

Like Blau, Mozilla applauded Twitter’s decision to jump on the bandwagon. “We’re excited that Twitter now supports Do Not Track,” said Alex Fowler, who leads privacy and public policies at Mozilla, in a post on the Mozilla site.

Mozilla was the first browser developer to add Do Not Track support; the setting and background HTTP header information was baked into Firefox 4, the version that launched in March 2011, and has remained in all subsequent releases.

Since Mozilla’s move, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) and Apple’s Safari have also added Do Not Track. In February, Google, which had long resisted supporting the technology, announced it would add Do Not Track to Chrome this year.

Chrome 19, which launched this week, does not support Do Not Track.

Ironically, alongside the Do Not Track support Twitter announced Thursday, it also kicked off what it called “tailored suggestions,” which uses tracking cookies to suggest accounts for new users to follow.

Tailored suggestions, said Twitter, was an “experiment” that it’s rolling out in some markets. The setting, found in the Personalization section of a user’s account, is turned on by default.

But if a user has enabled Do Not Track in their browser, the setting is meaningless, as Twitter has promised to “stop collecting the information that allows us to tailor Twitter based on your recent visits to websites that have integrated our buttons or widgets.”

Mayer verified this.

“DNT seems to trump a Twitter personalization account preference,” said Mayer, again on Twitter Thursday. “If personalization is on but DNT is enabled, there’s no ‘pid’ cookie.”

Blau didn’t see a direct connection between Twitter’s support for Do Not Track and the launch of tailored suggestions. “For the news yesterday, sure, [Do Not Track] might have softened any criticism of tailored suggestions, but in the long run, it doesn’t matter,” said Blau.

“There’s a natural tension between technology providers who want to provide value based on tracking, and consumers perceptions of privacy,” Blau added. “Over time, technology companies have to figure out where that balance is.”

In other Do Not Track news, Mozilla’s Fowler said that nearly 9% of desktop Firefox users have enabled the feature, and 19% of mobile Firefox users — Mozilla distributed a mobile version for Android smartphones — have done the same.

Those low numbers — particularly on the desktop — match Blau’s estimates for the percentage of users who have, for example, bothered to set privacy controls on their Facebook accounts.

“The perception in the media and among consumers is that technology sites are exploiting our data,” said Blau. “But even though consumers say they’re concerned, they don’t do anything about it.”

The contradiction is changing, although slowly.

“Today the 5%-6% number of people who have manipulated Facebook privacy controls is higher, ever since the FTC came down on Facebook at the end of 2011, so people are changing,” said Blau. “They’re starting to recognize what they’re saying about privacy is not what they’ve been doing about it.”

Twitter has posted instructions for Firefox, IE9 and Safari users who want to enable Do Not Track in those browsers.

Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld. Follow Gregg on Twitter at  @gkeizer, on Google+ or subscribe to Gregg’s RSS feed . His email address is gkeizer@computerworld.com.

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