Many websites collect information about visitors through cookies. Some of them include prominent sites such as Facebook. The collected data can be used for advertising and can even be sold to other companies looking to fill up their database with potential consumers. Now however, it seems that micro-blogging site Twitter, is looking to make a difference in that area. On Thursday, the company made an announcement it was working with Mozilla to enable Twitter users on the Firefox web-browser to opt out of being tracked by enabling the “Do Not Track” feature incorporated in Mozilla’s Firefox browser.
By enabling the feature, it will allow users to prevent cookies from collecting personal data but it will only work if a site agrees to acknowledge it like Twitter now has. Carolyn Penner, spokeswoman for Twitter said, “As the Federal Trade Commission’s CTO, Ed Felten, mentioned this morning, Twitter now supports ‘Do Not Track’. We applaud the FTC’s leadership on ‘Do Not Track’, and are excited to provide the benefits of ‘Do Not Track’.” Mozilla which are equally excited about this development, proceeded to share new statistics for the feature and congratulated the micro-blogging site in a statement that said, “We’re excited that Twitter now supports ‘Do Not Track’ and global user adoption rates continue to increase, which signifies a big step forward for ‘Do Not Track’ and the web.”
Update: Besides Mozilla Firefox, the ‘Do Not Track’ browser setting is now supported by recent versions of major browsers which include the before mentioned Firefox 5 and above, Internet Explorer 9 and above, Safari 5.1 and above and finally, for Chrome 17.0 or higher there is a third-party extension that enables ‘Do Not Track’. For more information with regards to any questions you might have about the ‘Do Not Track’ feature on browsers, you can click here to visit Twitter’s support page.
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