Firefox ditches Do Not Track because nobody was listening anyway

When Firefox 135 is released in February, it’ll ship with one less feature: Mozilla plans to remove the Do Not Track toggle from its Privacy and Security settings. 

The DNT toggle is already gone in the nightly developer release of Firefox 135, and Mozilla recently updated its Firefox support page for the privacy feature to indicate it’ll be gone for good once 135 is generally available, which is planned for February 4, 2025. 

As many have pointed out, however, and Mozilla reiterated, the optional nature of DNT means few websites actually honor the user’s request not to track their activity.

“Many sites do not respect this indication of a person’s privacy preferences, and, in some cases, it can reduce privacy,” Mozilla said on the updated DNT support page. It directs users to instead make use of newer Global Privacy Control features also present in the browser. 

We asked Mozilla if it had any data on how many sites actually respect DNT requests, but didn’t immediately hear back.

Global Privacy Control, or GPC, came to the forefront of online privacy as a replacement for DNT. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) never managed to get DNT made official thanks to industry lobbying that stalled its development, leaving it a purely optional measure that no one had to actually pay attention to. 

“As a result of the lack of consensus on how companies should operationalize the DNT preference, most sites do not respond to DNT as a consumer’s choice not to be tracked,” the Future of Privacy Forum noted on a page about DNT. 

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As we reported in 2020 when GPC was put forward as a new technical standard by a group that included Mozilla, Brave, DuckDuckGo, the EFF and others, the legislative landscape has changed since DNT was introduced to make GPC’s enforcement more practical. California’s Consumer Privacy Act and the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation both include requirements that companies respect an individual’s desire not to have their data shared or sold, and while there’s no national privacy law in the US, the need to conform with EU and California standards mean many companies go the cautious route by default. 

That’s not to say there’s any guarantee that anyone will actually respect GPC, which on its face functions very similarly to DNT, with user preferences for both simply expressed as a binary option in an HTTP header or DOM property. 

Additionally, while Firefox, Brave, DuckDuckGo, and other browsers include GPC toggles, neither Google Chrome nor Chromium-derived Microsoft Edge support the option, requiring the installation of a supporting browser or extension to get the job done. 

Those concerned with privacy may want to go a step further instead of relying again on companies that profit from tracking to respect their wishes, and install one of various browser extensions like Privacy Badger, uBlock Origin, or a VPN to add an additional layer of security. ®