Back where it started: “Do Not Track” removed from Firefox after 13 years

DNT now more liability than help

That moment, when every major browser had a Do Not Track option, was perhaps the height of DNT, and even then, there was a feeling that it could never work. Lorrie Faith Cranor, leader of the Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) that predated DNT, told Ars in 2012 that "every time we come up with a technical solution that protects privacy, the websites come up with something they want to do that is broken by this privacy protection."

Yahoo, citing itself as the "first major tech company" to implement DNT, announced in 2014 that it no longer would honor it. The firm noted that the White House-organized promise "remains unfulfilled" and that standardized DNT "resulted in deadlock." The Electronic Frontier Foundation debuted its Privacy Badger extension as a means of enforcing DNT when users demanded it soon after. In early 2015, the Federal Communications Commission dismissed a petition asking it to enforce DNT among website owners and services like Netflix, mostly on technical grounds, but eliminating one of the last hopes for some kind of broad shift.

Besides lacking regulatory teeth, DNT was also generally overcome by advancements in tracking. All the signals put out by a browser—plug-ins, time zone, monitor resolution, even the DNT option itself—could be used to effectively track a user, even across browsers. Apple dropped DNT from Safari in 2019, citing both its ineffectiveness and fingerprinting.

Concerns about tracking are now mostly left to the user to figure out for themselves, whether that means choosing sites and services that make explicit their policies on tracking, clicking "Reject all" on GDRP-compliant websites and seeing what happens, or using software tools (like VPNs marketed with vague promises) to subvert advertising systems.

This week's removal by Mozilla, which was at the vanguard of the Do Not Track movement, is more symbolic than practical. Chrome, the by-far dominant browser, still offers it, even if it disclaims it right underneath the setting. People have shown, overwhelmingly, that they want this kind of privacy, like the 96 percent of iOS users who opted out of app tracking when Apple offered a blocking option. But they're not going to secure it by asking the advertisers for it.