The W3C began looking at the idea of Do Not Track last year after two prominent members, Mozilla and Microsoft, implemented versions of the feature in their own Web browsers. In September, the W3C convened an 80-person Tracking Protection Working Group of industry, government, and academic experts to study the question, with the aim of thrashing out a single standard by mid-2012.
That goal now appears unlikely to be met, because the working group has run into major disagreements over how the technical standard could affect the $70-billion-a-year global online advertising market.
The technology of Do Not Track is relatively simple. When a browser accesses a Web page, it could send a signal—a 1 or a 0—to indicate whether the setting is enabled. What the working group hasn't been able to agree on is precisely how the signal should change the behavior of a page and its advertising technology.
One of the biggest sticking points: what even counts as "tracking." There's general agreement that users should be able to block third-party ad companies that record browsing behavior, using that information to serve up so-called targeted ads. However, advertisers insist they must still gather data on how many people—and in some cases which people—have viewed a particular ad on a website.
Some privacy activists in the working group say that allowing such data collection could eviscerate the standard, turning it into a "Do Not Target" technology rather than a means of protection for consumers who don't want their browsing monitored at all.
The result is a conflict that is pushing the standards body well beyond the nuts and bolts of the Web into hot-button economic and policy issues. "With Do Not Track, the technology issues are the least
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