Online Ad Company Adopts New 'Do Not Track' Standard for Web Browsing

September 30, 2015

San Francisco – Online advertising company Adzerk will offer compliance with EFF's new "Do Not Track" (DNT) standard for Web browsing starting this week, significantly strengthening the coalition of companies using the policy standard to better protect people from sites that try to secretly follow and record users’ Internet activity. Adzerk serves billions of ad impressions per month, and customers using its technology include Reddit, BitTorrent, and Stack Overflow.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and privacy company Disconnect launched the new DNT standard last month, joined by innovative publishing site Medium, major analytics service Mixpanel, popular ad- and tracking-blocking extension AdBlock, and private search engine DuckDuckGo.

"Adzerk is an important new member of the Do Not Track coalition, helping to protect millions of Internet users and others from stealthy online tracking and exploitation of their reading history,” said EFF Chief Computer Scientist Peter Eckersley. “We are thrilled that consensus keeps growing in the online advertising community: clear and fair practices are essential not only for privacy, but for the ongoing health of the industry."

DNT is a preference you can set on Firefox, Chrome, or other Web browsers as well as in the iOS or FirefoxOS mobile operating systems, which signals to websites that you want to opt-out of tracking of your online activities. DNT works in tandem with software like Privacy Badger and Disconnect, which not only set the DNT flag but also block trackers and ads that do not respect it. Adzerk is the first online advertising company that is offering its customers—the websites and other online services that show ads -- the ability to opt-in to using DNT, which would pass the extra tracking protection on to the sites' users.

Tracking by advertisers and other third parties is ubiquitous on the Web today, and typically occurs without the knowledge, permission, and consent of Internet users. However, you can see the evidence of this tracking when the online ads you see on one site seem to be based on what you looked at on another site. Meanwhile, the underlying records and profiles of your online activity are distributed between a vast network of advertising exchanges, data brokers, and tracking companies.

"Many websites get much of their operating revenue from online ads, yet the groundswell of discomfort from users about how their private information is being collected and used is leading to a boom in ad-blocking technologies. We need to find a way for privacy and advertising to work together," said Adzerk Chief Executive Officer James Avery. “The new Do Not Track gives us a way to provide publishers with ads that respect users' privacy and online choices, and which as a result will be visible in more users' browsers"

For more on Do Not Track:
https://www.eff.org/dnt-policy

For more from Adzerk:
http://www.adzerk.com/blog/2015/09/adzerk-joins-electronic-frontier-foundation-do-not-track-coalition-adopts-privacy-standard/

For more on the ad-blocker debate:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/09/adblockers-and-innovative-ad-companies-are-working-together-build-more-privacy

For more information contact:
Peter Eckersley
Chief Computer Scientist
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Phone: -
Email: pde@eff.org
Website: www.eff.org

Rebecca Jeschke
Media Relations Director and Digital Rights Analys
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Email: press@eff.org
Website: www.eff.org