ReadWriteWeb

Last December, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission called upon leaders in the Web browser industry to develop technological means to enable servers to comply with federal guidelines - which are likely to become laws.

The FTC mandated that they refrain from implementing any kind of behavioral tracking for individuals who explicitly opt out of all tracking. Although lawmakers two years ago envisioned a system where each server asks each user for her explicit permission, the preferable alternative would be for a user who simply never wishes to be tracked, to never be asked.

Roughly 5% of Firefox users run a plugin called AdBlock Plus, which effectively blocks all display and text ads on websites. There can be little doubt that the ethics of using a tool like this can get pretty tricky, though a lot of users do opt to block online ads; and given that this is mostly an all-or-nothing approach, once a user decides to block ads on one site that features exceptionally annoying ads, they will also block ads on every other site as well. Now, AdBlock Plus' developers have proposed a new meta tag that would allow site owners to pop up a notification for AdBlock Plus users, asking them if they want to block ads on a site that, according to the webmaster's own judgment, does not contain any "annoying advertising."