On December 1, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a preliminary report concerning one of the 21st century’s thorniest problems: online privacy. Specifically, advertising agencies and the marketers who love them are collecting and storing our movements across websites for the not-so-subtle purpose of targeting us with ads.

To this end, the FTC has recommended implementation of a “Do Not Track” mechanism that “allows consumers to opt out of the collection of information about their Internet behavior for targeted ads.” But the real issue is that there are no easy ways to prevent tracking, since the very technologies used to track you are also necessary to properly use many websites, like browser cookies. They’re how many websites implement the ability to log-into your many social networking accounts, and they record your browsing habits, too. Although all popular modern web browsers offer a variety of privacy protections--and third-party plug-ins exist to beef up security even further--there is no way to tell them not to hook a leash onto you.

I always feel like, somebody's tracking me

Tracking is persistent and pervasive. For example, start off at the Stargate website and click to a link about t-shirts; your browser will provide information about the “referrer URL” automatically. Two weeks later, on a site like the Daily Puppy, you’re still seeing ads on the side for Stargate t-shirts. In the business, this is known “behavioral tracking”, and it's often why we see relevant-to-us advertisements on sites that are totally unrelated.

Once upon a time, browser cookies were the primary--if not the only--way a web site could track information about you. But newer browser capabilities, like so-called “flash cookies”, or all the various technologies variously nicknamed “Web 2.0”, give websites a smorgasbord of new ways to store and retrieve information in your browser. And, to top it off, the new HTML 5 standard provides even more opportunities. All this tracking is another way of saying Big Brother is watching you and he wants to sell you something.

We’re not kidding. The internet advertising industry generated $6.4 billion in the third quarter of 2010 alone. With numbers like that, researchers predict that internet advertising will top $100 billion in a few years. That’s billions of reasons to motivate advertisers to collect such information as the fact that you frequent sites about “sports” and “adorable puppies."

"Do Not Track"

The less ethical (or more creative, depending on your point of view) marketing developers are constantly evolving new techniques for tracking. Because of this tracking arms-race between advertisers and web browser developers, a purely technological solution can never fix the problem entirely. And that’s where Do Not Track (DNT) comes in.

At heart, DNT is just a small additional piece of information your browser sends that tells the website you are visiting that information it gathers about you can’t be abused. The proposal, which came about thanks to public interest groups like the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), isn’t a law. It’s merely a suggestion that advertising companies should take our privacy into consideration.

As Doug Wolfgram, CEO of IntelliProtect, an online privacy management service, pointed out, “Advertising companies aren’t very good at regulating themselves, because they’re self interested.” But what's worse is the fact that there is no law currently in place to protect the consumers from constantly being bombarded with targeted advertisements at a time when they're least interested--like the Stargate advertisements on a website filled with adorable puppies.

Justin Brookman, director of the CDT’s project on consumer privacy, worries that consumer's interests aren't taken into consideration either. "I’d be worried about a law proscribing a particular technology today that in ten years may not make sense," he says. A law that codifies protection against ABC technology is useless when marketers have abandoned it in favor of the new XYZ technology—which isn’t illegal.

Even if applied, DNT could be undermined by commercial concerns. What if websites require you to disable the mechanism in order to access certain features of their websites? You could disable DNT on a site-by-site basis, but then that gives a competitive advantage to the ones that encourage you to do so, rapidly leading to copy-cat behavior. Is this a real concern? It’s hard to say until DNT becomes widespread.

And speaking of widespread, DNT’s intellectual predecessor, the Do Not Call Implementation Act, which makes unwanted telemarketing phone calls illegal, has been a law since 2003. Although telemarketing still exists, as anyone who has sat down to a meal and finished it without interruption can tell you, there are far fewer obtrusive phone calls than prior to the Act. Also, there are legal recourses for people who are subject to these unwanted intrusions. If Do Not Call is any example, Do Not Track should have a similarly benign effect. 

Also, there times when you might want to be tracked, says Wolfgram. “If you want to plan a vacation, it might be useful to book a flight and have [advertisers] recommend hotels, restaurants, and concerts in the area.” In other words, advertising doesn’t exist merely to convince you to buy a product; it also exists to inform.

Protect yourself--and your data

So how do consumers protect themselves against unwanted tracking now? Your protection and vulnerability rely entirely on the browser you're using. Peep the chart below for a look at how some of the browsers stack up.

Image credit: Center for Democracy and Technology

Ultimately, there’s no easy solution to stop tracking. Stanford University’s Center for the Internet and Society writes on their website, “Blocking software requires perpetual development and user vigilance…Users must, consequently, periodically ensure their blocking software is still maintained and up-to-date.” Thankfully, there are browser plug-ins like Ghostery, available for Safari and other browsers, that help with these tricky tracking mechanisms. You can also check out the official DoNotTrack.Us website for other add-ons.

As the DoNotTrack.Us site says, “At present, a user cannot opt out of many of the hundreds of tracking services and advertising networks; those that do allow opting out each require setting (and not deleting!) an opt-out cookie.”But even though the Do Not Track recommendation is not perfect, it is better than the status quo. Brookman concedes that consumers should ultimately have the choice of whether or not they want to be on these lists, not the other way around.