The Wall Street Journal reports today that some ad agencies are now embracing a
“do-not-track” system. This is a stark difference from the position the ad world has taken on such a system even just a few weeks ago. From the Journal: “Mr. Ingis said do-no-track initially provoked “a little bit of frustration” in advertising executives who had been focused on making the icon system work. More recently, though, he said executives realized the two tools could work together. “We think it’s going to be a further tool to implement the [principles] the business community already committed to,” Mr. Ingis said. It is still not clear how ad networks and advertisers will interpret do-not-track requests. Some ad networks still collect information about Web browsing when users opt out of their systems, but don’t use that information to display targeted ads.”