Free IE and Firefox plugin blocks advertising tracking sites

By Stephen Pate – DNT+, short for Do Not Track, is free browser plugin that stops advertising and online behavioral sites from tracking a users every move on the web.

The software is from Abine The Online Privacy Company. Users or organizations can download it free. There are browser specific versions. DNT+ downloads the plugin for each. Visit the site with each browser and a browser specific version is downloaded and installed.

Have you ever looked for something odd on the internet like “multi-touch monitor” or “VMware training” and for days or weeks every site you land on is advertising those products. That’s because companies are tracking what users search for and buy. Then they flood the user with opportunities to buy based on the profile of their habits and demographics.

Guided Tour of DNT+

Amazon.com pioneered this software. Surfing around the site would create a trail of items viewed. Now they sites follow users everywhere.

The DNT+ software stops the tracking. A small yellow circle in the browser, upper right indicates how many and what sites are tracking.

Facebook, for instance, allows more than 20 sites to track users. Tracking on Facebook can also be lessened by removing applications that allow access to the user account, another good idea.

IE and Firefox implemented similar do not follow software but they were clumsy and often caused the browser to stop working. Carnegie Mellon reported last year that people could not make do-not-tracking software workable. Why Johnny Can’t Opt Out: A Usability Evaluation of Tools to Limit Online Behavioral Advertising

We present results of a 45-participant laboratory study investigating the usability of tools to limit online behavioral advertising (OBA).We tested nine tools, including tools that block access to advertising websites, tools that set cookies indicating a user’s preference to opt out of OBA, and privacy tools that are built directly into web browsers. We interviewed participants about OBA, observed their behavior as they installed and used a privacy tool, and recorded their perceptions and attitudes about that tool. We found serious usability flaws in all nine tools we examined.

The online opt-out tools were challenging for users to understand and configure. Users tend to be unfamiliar with most advertising companies, and therefore are unable to make meaningful choices. Users liked the fact that the browsers we tested had built-in Do Not Track features, but were wary of whether advertising companies would respect this preference. Users struggled to install and configure blocking lists to make effective use of blocking tools. They often erroneously concluded the tool they were using was blocking OBA when they had not properly configured it to do so.

The earlier version of this software made life on the web difficult. The new version is smoother, allowing you to accept some tracking. There is a price to pay for free social media sites like Facebook. If you don’t let them track anything, they can turn off wanted features.

Using DNT+ should also speed up users’ browsing since there are fewer processes running in the background.

Users can expect the tracking companies to develop workarounds but at least DNT+ works for now.