With both Google and Facebook being scrutinized for their privacy policies, Twitter has now provided “Do Not Track” to its user so as to block the possibility of sharing personal information with third party websites – and was announced by Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chief Technology Officer, Ed Felten, at an internet privacy forum.

The FTC chairman Jon Leibowitz, in supporting this decision, said, “Twitter’s use of ‘Do Not Track’ in its new feature is good news for Twitter users and a meaningful step toward broader adoption of a strong ‘Do Not Track’ system that will give consumers simple, comprehensive control over online tracking. Hopefully other companies will follow suit.”

What this “Do Not Track” service does is block third-party cookies which is used to obtain personal information about the user as well as his or her online activity. For this, all one has to do is enable the “Do Not Track” feature available in Mozilla Firefox. Other browsers like Safari and Internet Explorer also have similar features.

These steps taken by Twitter to protect online privacy comes at a time when the White House and Commerce Department officials are actually working on a set of federal regulations to protect web users’ personal information.

However, Facebook and Google have recently made major changes to their privacy policies leading to a negative reaction from people especially from Web privacy advocates who have expressed their uneasiness about the manner in which Facebook and Google might take advantage of user data to generate profits, with the possible compromise of their users’ privacy.

According to Mozilla Firefox, almost 9 % of its users enable the “Do Not Track” option, and most of these users are from France, the Netherlands and the United States.