Popular:
 Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

Detect “Do Not Track” with JavaScript

By  on  

Do Not Track is an excellent idea.  The DNT website describes it best:

Do Not Track is a technology and policy proposal that enables users to opt out of tracking by websites they do not visit, including analytics services, advertising networks, and social platforms. At present few of these third parties offer a reliable tracking opt out, and tools for blocking them are neither user-friendly nor comprehensive. Much like the popular Do Not Call registry, Do Not Track provides users with a single, simple, persistent choice to opt out of third-party web tracking.

The preference is sent from the client to the server via a HTTP header but you can also get its value using JavaScript:

// "1" or "unspecified"
if(navigator.doNotTrack == 1) {
    // Do (or don't do) stuff.
}

If you wanted to be extreme about honoring your user's preference, you could use that to lazyload (or not) advertising, analytics, or other utilities. Probably a bit extreme but it's there for you to use!

Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring

Recent Features

  • By
    I’m an Impostor

    This is the hardest thing I've ever had to write, much less admit to myself.  I've written resignation letters from jobs I've loved, I've ended relationships, I've failed at a host of tasks, and let myself down in my life.  All of those feelings were very...

  • By
    Animated 3D Flipping Menu with CSS

    CSS animations aren't just for basic fades or sliding elements anymore -- CSS animations are capable of much more.  I've showed you how you can create an exploding logo (applied with JavaScript, but all animation is CSS), an animated Photo Stack, a sweet...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Multiple Backgrounds with CSS

    Anyone that's been in the web development industry for 5+ years knows that there are certain features that we should have had several years ago. One of those features is the HTML5 placeholder; we used JavaScript shims for a decade before placeholder came...

  • By
    Create a Dojo Lightbox with dojox.image.Lightbox

    One of the reasons I love the Dojo Toolkit is that it seems to have everything.  No scouring for a plugin from this site and then another plugin from that site to build my application.  Buried within the expansive dojox namespace of Dojo is

Discussion

  1. Triangle717

    Is the resulting value always a string or an integer except when unspecified (then it is a string), and are the values you stated the same cross-browser (especially the unspecified value)?

  2. Matt

    I really like how medium handles DNT.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!