Google, Microsoft and Mozilla to add new privacy features to web browsers

Updates to the Chrome and Firefox browsers, which include a "do not track" feature, are due to be rolled out early this year.

The US House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Commerce Trade and Consumer Protection concluded that more transparency and consumer control regarding the practice of tracking users' activities are needed to protect consumers. 

Mozilla have been working on implementing the recommendation, but believe that for a do-not-track option to work, tracking companies would need to agree not to monitor surfers who have the feature enabled.

Google recently announced an extension called ChromeBlock which gives you an easy way to shut down around 90 different web tracking networks. The extension prevents the networks from personalising their ads which are delivered to your PC and from tracking data about your usage for online advertising.

On the Chrome Web store site Google wrote.

"We recognize that some users are uncomfortable with the personalization of ads that they see on the web and we offer many levels of control over this personalization. Two years ago we launched two ground-breaking innovations, the Ads Preferences Manager and the industry’s first persistent cookie opt-out. Now we’re giving users who don’t want their ads personalized the same permanent, one-click control for advertising-related cookies across our industry."

Microsoft have said that Internet Explorer 9 will include "do-not-track" functionality when it is released early this year, but they are said to have backed out of releasing the option in Internet Explorer 8 after advertisers became concerned about the impact on their business.