WP DoNotTrack

Most solutions for Cookie Law compliance focus on alerting the user of the fact that cookies are needed and on allowing or disallowing 1st party cookies (i.e. from your own site) from being set. WP DoNotTrack takes a different (and complementary) approach, with the ability to act on user preference as configured in the browser or an opt-out cookie being present (see below) to conditionally stop javascript-initiated 3rd party tracking.

Both Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 9 and up offer full-fledged support for "DoNotTrack" (both in HTTP header & javascript). Apple's Safari has this option hidden in the "Develop" menu and Opera 12 (in beta now) also offers DNT-support. In fact, only Google Chrome does not have this feature at all (Google, after all, sells personalized advertising, so this touches their core business), although support is supposed to land before the end of the year.

Starting with version 0.8.0, WP DoNotTrack supports conditional tracking based on cookies. There currently are two approaches to do this:

• display a message asking your user to allow (or OK) tracking. If the user does not want to allow this, simply set a cookie (in JavaScript or PHP) with name "dont_track_me" and value "1" and WP DoNotTrack will pick up on that much in the same way it works with the browsers DNT-flag.
• alternatively, WP DoNotTrack can also rely on the Civic Cookie Control cookie as implemented by the Cookie Control WordPress plugin.

Although whitelist is more robust and future-proof, it might break things in both frontend and wp-admin. If you don't want to test extensively and you're not sure to begin with, start out going blacklist first.

• Check what requests the browser makes when not logged in (look at a couple of different pages) and add the hostname of URL's you deem unfit to the blacklist
• Disable any caching- or javascript-aggregating plugin while testing/ making changes
• Try an external service like webpagetest.org to make sure you're seeing a real anonymous user's view

• Whitelisting is somewhat more impacting, as it'll stop anything you don't explicitely allow. Be sure to study requests for both visitors and logged in users in wp-admin. In general you'd want to allow known hosts such as e.g. google-analytics.com.
• Make sure to test extensively after enabling the whitelist and tweak until everything works to your satisfaction.
• Disable any caching- or javascript-aggregating plugin while testing/ making changes
• Try an external service like webpagetest.org to make sure you're seeing a real anonymous user's view

Yes, but No. When running in Normal or Forced mode, WP DoNotTrack stops most javascript-initiated 3rd party code inclusion. When running in SuperClean Mode, WP DoNotTrack will also filter the HTML. There are, however, circumstances in which tracking is unavoidable or invisible to WP DoNotTrack:

• some widgets (in the broad sense) only work with tracking enabled (e.g. Facebook Like button or Google Analytics tracking)
• some trackers use Flash, which is simply out of reach of what WP DoNotTrack currently can do

Javascript (and CSS/ HTML) optimizing plugins such as W3 Total Cache and Autoptimize change the way JavaScript is loaded (by combining, minimizing and loading at the end of the page), which can break or limit WP DoNotTrack's functionality.

By default DoNotTrack is used to stop javascript trackers, which typically only add the tracking stuff to your pages when executed in the browser. Some widgets/ plugins/ themes might also add tracking to the HTML (as a hidden image, iframe or with javascript). "SuperClean" mode checks the HTML before it is sent to the browser to stop that kind of tracking. Be warned that SuperClean is pretty invasive functionality, so do test extensively!

Superclean is not yet available if you're only enabling WP DoNotTrack for people who configured their browsers to do so (conditional filtering based on the donottrack-header) or who opted out with a cookie. This might become available in the future, but there's caching plugins to take into account when combining conditional filtering with SuperClean.

• After installing or when making changes to the WP DoNotTrack configuration, you might have to clear the caches of caching plugins you might be using (e.g. WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache). Consider it "best practice" to disable caching & javascript-aggregating plugins while testing new black- or whitelists
• ClourFlare seems to interfere with the way the plugin gets loaded and the way it functions. You can solve the problem by disabling "Rocket Loader" and/or "Auto Minify" alltogether.
• Not a bug, but still an known issue; as WP DoNotTrack is also active in the wp-admin-pages, it will -when in whitelist mode- impact plugins that (for whatever reason) pull in javascript from elsewhere in their option-pages. This very plugin for instance, depends on googleapis.com to render a rss-widget.

Just tell me, I like the feedback and in general I'll reply within a couple of hours. Use the Contact-page on my blog, leave a comment in a post about DoNotTrack or post about it on the wordpress.org plugin forum

• Explain people (in real life and/or on your blog, on Facebook, on Twitter ...) that you disabled 3rd party tracking on your blog.
• Tell me about bugs you think you've found and if you can't find any, confirm it works with your version of WP on wordpress.org
• Ask me for a feature you would like to see added (cfr. contact info above)
• Rate my plugin on wordpress.org.