Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) has recently made an announcement that it will stop honoring the requests made by the users’ browsers on their behalf not to be monitored for advertising. The announcement was made on the company’s blog. It stated that it won’t enable Do Not Track (DNT) requests effective immediately.
“As of today, web browser Do Not Track settings will no longer be enabled on Yahoo. As the first major tech company to implement Do Not Track, we’ve been at the heart of conversations surrounding how to develop the most user-friendly standard. However, we have yet to see a single standard emerge that is effective, easy to use and has been adopted by the broader tech industry.”
So, the post also mentioned that the company is looking for a solution to develop the most user-friendly platform. There is no single platform that currently provides the best user-friendly experience.
Actually, Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) stopped honoring the DNT requests from Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)’s Internet Explorer 10 back in 2012, as Microsoft had enabled the DNT for IE 10 by default, which was not dependent on users’ preferences.
The ‘Do Not Track’ project was started by the WWW Consortium and a few researchers in order to give web users more freedom. This technology takes care of the people who browse the internet and still want to keep their preferences as private. What happens here is the web surfer’s browser sends out the Do Not Track signal via a HTTP header and the search engines as well as the advertising groups stop tracking the user’s browsing history to set relative ads on the pages.
The company also mentioned that the users can still maintain privacy on Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) while getting a customized web experience. Users can use the online privacy tools that Yahoo offers and those can be accessed by Yahoo Privacy Center. Already an advertising industry group backed out of the tracking protection program initiated by WWW Consortium.
If this continues, the DNT may be headed for similar destiny of its predecessor, the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) project.
Well, Yahoo is one of the first major companies that would not entertain the privacy requests of the users. Companies are not showing much interest in altering their behavior upon receiving Do Not track requests. The list of firms honoring the Do Not Track project is tiny, however, companies like Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) and Pinterest are on the list.
This might lead to anger among the users of Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO). We will have to wait and watch on what happens in the near future and also if this might impact the stock price of the company.
