I came across an article written by medium regarding on "Do Not Track" (DNT) Policy on medium.com . It's quite interesting about the fact that a lot of browser do not respect "Do Not Track", so I decided t do a bit of research on DNT and implemented on my own site.

Background story

According to Wikipedia, "Do Not Track" (DNT) is already available in the internet back in 2010.

According to research done by duckduckgo (DDG), this is the result:

source: searchenginejournal.com

It's quite surprising that a lot of websites are not respecting DNT, even some of the big ones like Facebook and Google.

How to enable DNT

upscribe written an article on medium on how to enable DNT on your preferred browser:

https://medium.com/upscribe/how-to-disable-enable-do-not-track-dnt-in-your-browser-db6b6bd7dd0a

How to implement it in your browser

There's 2 ways of doing it, one on the server side and one on the client side.

Server side

Referring to MDN standard, a user will send in HTTP request with a header called "DNT".

DNT: 0
DNT: 1

0 - allow site to track

1 - don't allow site to track

Simple Nodejs server for demo

#!/usr/bin/env node

const http = require("http");

const app = http.createServer((req, res) => {
  console.log(req.headers.dnt);
  // Set a response type of plain text for the response
  res.writeHead(200, { "Content-Type": "text/html" });

  // Send back a response and end the connection
  res.end("Hello, World!");
});

// Start the server on port 3010
const port = 3010;

app.listen(port, "127.0.0.1");

All you need is to get request headers with req.headers.dnt. If dnt is 1, you should not serve or track that user.

Client Side

For client side, chrome will setup on navigator.doNotTrack and the output for DNT users will be "1" in string.

Sample Code

if (navigator.doNotTrack !== 1) {
  // run tracking script (google analytics or any related services)
}

Conclusion

Quoting from DuckDuckGo,

DuckDuckGo argues that the DNT setting is inherently misleading, and there’s a huge discrepancy between the name of the setting and what it actually does.

However, the DNT setting is only a voluntary signal which websites are not obligated to respect.

With DNT, users should be able to take in control on what are their preferred content or ads. It's fascinating that google tag manager and ads do not respect that by default.

Hope this article helps in raising the awareness on DNT and web privacy.

Bonus

I implemented DNT on to my personal portfolio site. You can use DDG privacy extension, you can see a tracker existed when DNT is disabled.

With DNT

Without DNT

P.S. Article is posted on steem blockchain and also showed on my site at https://wenghan.me/blog/use-do-not-track-on-your-web-browser