What is my Do Not Track setting?
Do Not Track is a request with no enforcement behind it, and almost nothing honours it. The successor, Global Privacy Control, is a similar signal with actual legal weight in some jurisdictions, which is the part that was missing the first time. Turning DNT on today mostly makes you marginally more distinctive.
Whether your browser is sending the Do Not Track signal is shown above. Do Not Track (DNT) is an optional header your browser can attach to requests, expressing a preference that sites should not track you across the web. When enabled, it sends a value that essentially means "please do not track me".
Here is the uncomfortable truth: DNT is almost entirely honour-based, and almost no site honours it. There was never a law requiring sites to obey it, most ignored it, and as a result several browsers have removed the setting altogether. So even when this page shows DNT as on, it likely changes very little.
The more effective successor is Global Privacy Control (GPC), a similar signal that some privacy laws (notably in California) treat as a legally binding opt-out of data sale or sharing. Where DNT was a polite request, GPC has actual teeth in certain jurisdictions.
How a website reads this
This is the exact call a page makes. Nothing else is involved, and nothing is sent anywhere: the value is read in your browser and displayed to you.
navigator.doNotTrackReturns "1" when the preference is on, "0" when it is explicitly off, and null when unset. Chrome removed the setting, Firefox deprecated its own in favour of Global Privacy Control, and Safari dropped it years ago on the grounds that the header itself had become a fingerprinting signal.
- Needs your permission
- No, it is read silently
- Can it be faked
- Yes. It is a preference your browser announces. Any client can announce it or not, and no site is obliged to act on it either way.
- Contribution to a fingerprint
- About 0.5 bits, our own estimate. Our estimate, low but not zero, and pointing the wrong way: because so few people enable it, having it on makes you slightly easier to single out rather than harder. That irony is the honest summary of the whole standard. How we estimate this.
What you should know
Why sites collect it
Sites can read the DNT signal to decide whether to honour a tracking opt-out, and a well-behaved analytics setup might respect it. In practice, the signal is mostly logged and ignored, which is the core problem with DNT.
Privacy implications
Enabling DNT rarely stops tracking, and ironically the setting itself adds a tiny bit of fingerprinting entropy because relatively few people enable it. It is not harmful, but it is not real protection either. Effective privacy comes from blocking rather than asking politely.
How to change or hide it
Where your browser still offers DNT, you can toggle it in privacy settings, but do not rely on it. For real effect, use tracker-blocking (content blockers, a privacy browser) and, where available, enable Global Privacy Control, which some laws require sites to honour.
Frequently asked questions
Does Do Not Track actually stop tracking?
Rarely. It is an honour-based request that almost no site obeys, and there is no law forcing compliance. Tracker-blocking is far more effective.
What is the difference between DNT and GPC?
DNT is a voluntary request that is widely ignored. Global Privacy Control is a similar signal that some privacy laws treat as a binding opt-out, so it carries legal weight in places.
Sources
Browser behaviour changes and vendors cap these values differently, so the claims above that are not self-evident are checked against the specifications and vendor documentation below.
Last checked on . How these values are measured and estimated is set out on the methodology page.
Something wrong here? Tell us what your browser reports and it gets corrected.