Advertising, Do Not Track | featured news

The two-year-old drive to give consumers a simple way to block companies from tracking their behavior as they move across the Internet has faltered, say participants in the process who are struggling to reconcile privacy concerns with an advertising model that pays for many free Internet services.

Advertisers are girding for battle against browser mechanisms intended to offer more online privacy. At stake is nothing less than the future of the surveillance economy.

Federal regulators are proposing to create a "Do Not Track" tool for the Internet so that people could prevent marketers from tracking their Web browsing habits and other online behavior in order to target advertising....