Twitter will be implementing the Do Not Track feature in the Mozilla Firefox browser, as announced Thursday by Ed Felten, chief technology officer for the Federal Trade Commission at a New York Internet Week privacy panel. Twitter confirmed the FTC's announcement, appropriately enough, in a tweet.
Carolyn Penner, a spokeswoman for Twitter, said, "We applaud the FTC’s leadership on Do Not Track, and are excited to provide the benefits of Do Not Track."
The Do Not Track feature in Firefox enables users to opt out of cookies that collect personal information, as well as cookies that are used for advertising. Do Not Track only works on websites that specifically implement it. Facebook, which can be viewed as a competitor to Twitter in the social networking space, does not allow users to opt out of its data collection, though Facebook has opened up a bit by allowing users to see the kind of information being collected. Facebook even tracks people who are not logged into Facebook.
Mozilla confirmed the announcement as well in a blog post. The blog post notes that Do Not Track adoption rates are 8.6% for desktop users and 19% for mobile users. The biggest adoption rates so far are in The Netherlands, France and the United States.
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