Twitter Makes A DNT Entry

Online, May 21, 2012 (Newswire.com) - Twitter's support for the DNT initiative was first announced on Thursday by Ed Felten, the FTC's Chief Technology Officer, during a panel in New York. The social micro blogging site later confirmed Felten's statement, adding in a Tweet : "We applaud the FTC's leadership on DNT."

Twitter does not require tracking its user as of now since none of its revenue comes from the ads which are targeted to users. Twitter makes money from promoted tweets and promoted profiles and both seem to be location based promotions and nothing very specific to a user.

DNT is not a short form for Dental and it does not represent a chemical all it represents is we care about your privacy. Do Not Track is the [url: http://www.twitqa.com/qid/what_is_the_full_form_of_kfc/1298]full form[/url] for DNT and "Do Not Track" originated as an FTC suggestion for browsers.

"Do Not Track," would allow users to completely opt out of being tracked by third-party websites. Do Not Track is a browser feature that allows you to let a website know you would like to opt-out of third-party tracking for purposes including behavioural advertising. It does this by transmitting a Do Not Track HTTP header every time your data is requested from the Web. Users will still see ads, but not ones geared specifically at the user.

What makes tracking users more attractive is the fact it fetches more money. Take an example where someone goes to an ecommerce website to buy a SLR camera. A day after buying the camera you start to see ads which are selling you the powerful lenses for your camera. At first how the hell did someone know that you have bought a camera which no one knows except your neighbour? This is where the tracking comes into place. The ad networks and ecommerce websites know a lot about users and they make a lot of cash from this knowledge.

From the time FTC made the DNT suggestion the browsers are trying to comply. Mozilla added the feature in January 2011.Microsoft which owns the most popular browser added the same to IE9 in February 2011.The one browser which is lacking the feature is Chrome. What makes Google lazy about implementing this feature would be the fact that many of its revenue dollars come from ads which are targeted on your behaviour. Officially Google has [url: http://www.twitqa.com/blog/archives/1940]commented[/url] to take this matter seriously only in the fourth quarter of 2012.

Mozilla came out with a blog post to praise Twitter's adoption of DNT and also invited others to support the initiative. Few people see this move from Twitter as a reply to what Facebook had to go through roughly before the IPO so if Twitter was to go public tomorrow it has made a point we care about privacy like no one else.