In a move aimed at dealing with the irksome “behaviorally targeted advertising” system, which has become quite common on the Web, Mozilla and Google recently announced the addition of “do not track” tools to their Firefox and Chrome browsers respectively.

The new tools added by Mozilla and Google will allow users to opt out of the behavioral tracking mechanism used by online advertisers. With the mechanism having been largely opposed by privacy advocates for quite some time now, the US Federal Trade Commission has also re-focused its attention on the issue.

While Mozilla and Google have already announced their ‘do not track’ tools, Microsoft too intends offering support for a similar tool in a forthcoming version of its Internet Explorer.

According to the proposal announced by Mozilla on January 23, the company will transmit a “Do Not Track” HTTP header with every page view or click in Firefox. The HTTP header, once enabled, passes a signal to Web sites that the user does not wish to be tracked by third-parties. However, Mozilla’s ‘do not track’ tool necessitates a buy-in from the sites themselves. Meanwhile, the Google ‘do not track’ tool – the availability of which was announced on January 24 – is essentially an extension for Google Chrome. The extension, dubbed “Keep My Opt-Outs”, preserves the opt-out cookies of the users even after these cookies are cleared from their browsers.