I prepared a short position paper for the first W3C Workshop on Web Tracking and User Privacy on March 24, 2011.
I argue that the current proposals for allowing users to opt-out of tracking (which amount to either “do not collect/retain” or “do not use to target ads”) are not workable. I propose a third option focused primarily on the active removal of persistent identifiers that are used to correlate browsing activity over multiple sessions or multiple websites, allowing collecting data in de-identified form.
Ashkan Soltani 