A group of tech organizations band together for a new web standard that will promote enhanced privacy for people and their online activities, Fast Company reported on October 8.

Some of the members are the US-based digital rights non-profit Electronic Frontier Foundation, Firefox creator Mozilla, and the search engine DuckDuckGo. Both Mozilla Firefox and DuckDuckGo are known for being more privacy-focused than the mainstream Google alternatives, Chrome and Google Search.

The group launches what is called a Global Privacy Control, a setting to be implemented in browsers or through a browser extension that will tell each website a person visits to not sell or share their data.

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The setting aims to stop websites from building a digital profile of users, visible across the web, and used to target people with tailored ads and content. Digital platforms collecting massive amounts of data from people’s online behavior is the status quo.

But the practice has led to more negative effects on democracy as platforms’ data-powered content targeting led to echo chambers that reinforce biases, cause polarization, and leave people vulnerable to hate-laced, bias-confirming misinformation and disinformation. (READ: What you need to know about surveillance capitalism)

The new standard aims to help the privacy movement take a step toward a private web browsing environment that will not rely on the collection of user data for profit.

The groups seek support from regions with proactive rules on privacy such as California with its California Consumer Privacy Act, and Europe with its General Data Protection Regulation.

A similar “Do Not Track” setting is already available on browsers including Chrome but websites are free to ignore the setting. The groups behind Global Privacy Control are looking to gain legal backing in order to enforce browsing privacy more strictly.

Fast Company reports the standard is at an experimental stage and “currently not intended to convey legally binding requests,” said Peter Dolanjski, DuckDuckGo director of product. Dolanjski expects the standard to move forward however as authorities and industry groups react and implement the setting.

The article also notes that publishers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Financial Times, and Automattic, which operates blogging platforms wordpress.com and Tumblr, are backing the new standard.

The setting is already available on DuckDuckGo, and is expected to be on Firefox and other browsers in the future. People can also visit the Global Privacy Control website, which can tell users if they have the setting on. – Rappler.com