A ‘Do Not Track’ option on internet browsers to stop advertisers from offering targeted advertising by tracking your activity is unlikely to be here in the new future.

The tracking can be turned off on most ads by clicking “AdChoices” or similar and deselecting that advert from the tracking page that is displayed. This tracking does not save any information that can be read by people, only for robots to use and offer you targeted advertisements such as products you recently viewed on Amazon for example.

According to KSAT, various parties have been trying to discuss what ‘tracking’ involves and suggest ways that this kind of button can be implemented into mainstream browsers, however nothing has yet come of the decisions. The only thing we have seen is a cookie policy in the United Kingdom which means all UK based sites must let their customers know that cookies may be stored. This appeared to not apply to US based sites, and was mainly for .co.uk domains. This may change in the near future however.

Advertisements fall into a different area, and relevent advertisements do get a better click through rate. This means if a Do not track button is to be implemented, it could cause a loss of revenue for people who rely on Click based advertising on their websites. CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions) based networks may be fine however.

It looks ‘impossible’ that the option will be implemented before the end of the year. Perhaps this will be a 2013 feature. Some consumers feel that targeted advertising is actually useful however.

Source: [KSAT]