Chrome adds Do Not Track, rolling out by end of the year

Chrome adds Do Not Track, rolling out by end of the year
DNT bingo: house!

Google has finally added Do Not Track to its Chrome browser, with the privacy-friendly setting making an appearance in the latest developer build.

This means that the average web user won't have the DNT option just yet, but Google says that it will be rolling out by the end of this year.

Google spokesman Rob Shilkin told All Things D, "We undertook to honour an agreement on DNT that the industry reached with the White House early this year.

"To that end we're making this setting visible in our Chromium developer channel, so that it will be available in upcoming versions of Chrome by year's end."

Track off

The setting allows users to send an automatic request to every website that they don't want third-parties like advertisers to be able to track them as they journey across the internet and use that information to target adverts towards them.

Microsoft has already included DNT as the default option in IE10 and it's been present in Firefox since time immemorial (2009); so Chrome completes the big three web browsers.

The main problem with DNT, though, is that not all that many websites and advertisers actually abide by it, since it's more of a guideline than an actual rule.

Twitter supports it, for example, but Facebook does not. So even if you turn DNT on in your web browser of choice, advertisers could still be peeping at your efforts to find the perfect wardrobe on one site and advertising a bunch of cheap crappy wardrobes to you on another massively irrelevant site.

From All Things D

News Editor (UK)

Former UK News Editor for TechRadar, it was a perpetual challenge among the TechRadar staff to send Kate (Twitter, Google+) a link to something interesting on the internet that she hasn't already seen. As TechRadar's News Editor (UK), she was constantly on the hunt for top news and intriguing stories to feed your gadget lust. Kate now enjoys life as a renowned music critic – her words can be found in the i Paper, Guardian, GQ, Metro, Evening Standard and Time Out, and she's also the author of 'Amy Winehouse', a biography of the soul star.