Firefox backs ‘Do Not Track’ with online stealth

As concern about online privacy grows, Mozilla is promising to let people cloak internet activity in free Firefox web browsing software being released early next year.

“Technology that supports something like a ‘Do Not Track’ button is needed and we will deliver in the first part of next year,” Mozilla chief executive officer Gary Kovacs said while providing a glimpse at Firefox 4 at the Mozilla’s headquarters in Mountain View, California.

“The user needs to be in control,” he added.

There is a disturbing imbalance between what websites need to know about visitors to personalise advertisements or services and the amount of data collected, according to Kovacs.

“It is not that ads are bad,” he said. “It is what they do with my tracked behavior.

“Where I go on the internet is how I live my life; that is a lot of data to hold just for someone to serve me ads.”

Microsoft this month unveiled increased privacy options for the upcoming version of its popular web browser Internet Explorer 9 including a feature “to help keep third-party websites from tracking your web behaviour.”

Microsoft said “Tracking Protection” will be built into a test version of IE9 being released early next year.

IE9 users will have to be savvy enough to activate the feature and create lists of the third-party websites that they do not want to track their behaviour.

Internet Explorer is the most widely used web browser in the US followed by Mozilla’s Firefox, Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari.

Google, which beefed up Chrome in recent weeks and is testing a notebook computer that operates on the web browser software, cautioned that the mechanics and ramifications of stealth browsing need to be figured out.

“The idea of ‘Do Not Track’ is interesting, but there doesn’t seem to be consensus on what ‘tracking’ really means, nor how new proposals could be implemented in a way that respects people’s current privacy controls,” said the company, also based in Mountain View.

“We look forward to ongoing dialogue about what ‘Do Not Track’ could look like, and in the meantime we are always looking into new tools to give people more transparency and control over their online privacy.”