Policymakers Should Opt Out of “Do Not Track”

For the last few years privacy fundamentalists have called for a national Do Not Track feature for online advertising modeled after the national Do Not Call Registry. The purpose of a Do Not Track feature would be to provide consumers a single, centralized mechanism to opt out of all online profiling for targeted advertising. However, such a mandate would impose unnecessary costs on software developers, result in more intrusive and less relevant advertising for consumers, and, if widely adopted, significantly harm the current funding mechanism for the Internet ecosystem, resulting in less free Internet content and services.