Although about a dozen U.S. states—including California, Delaware, New Jersey, and Texas—now require businesses to honor consumers’ privacy preferences online, most browsers do not offer a native opt-out option that lets you signal those preferences by default. Now, the California Opt Me Out Act, which goes into effect on Jan 1, 2027, is making it mandatory for browsers to do so.
Global Privacy Control (GPC) is an open-source consumer privacy protocol developed jointly by several universities, media organizations, and privacy-focused tech companies. Instead of having to hunt for a manual “Do Not Sell” or “Refuse Third-Party Cookies” link on every website and app, you enable this feature once in your browser to send a legal notification to every online destination you visit that you’d like to opt out of all data sharing and targeted advertising features.
Unlike previous iterations like Firefox’s Do Not Track, GPC issues a specific request that’s backed by leading data protection legislation, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), making websites and businesses more likely to honor them. With over 150 million users and more than 66,000 participating websites, the GPC project has garnered support and participation from the Mozilla Foundation, The Washington Post, Automattic, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), The New York Times, and others. It has even been made into an official work item at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
How to enable Global Privacy Control on your browser
When it comes to GPC support, web browsers fall broadly into two camps. There are privacy-focused platforms like Brave Browser, DuckDuckGo, and Firefox that offer native support using a built-in toggle, or just enable it by default. Then there are mainstream browsers like Chrome, Edge, and Safari that offer limited support through third-party extensions, or sometimes none at all. Here are the exact steps to follow to enable Global Privacy Control on Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Brave Browser, and others:
You don’t need to do anything to enable GPC on Brave Browser, but there’s an easy way to confirm whether it’s active and running:
Confirm that the Settings page reads Default or Enabled, not Disabled.
Brave Shields and Privacy to find the corresponding toggle.
DuckDuckGo
If you’d like to confirm that GPC is on when you’re using DuckDuckGo, there’s an easy way to do that:
Check the notification banner at the very top to see if it reads “GPC signal detected.”
Firefox has offered GPC support since version 120. However, it’s not enabled by default, and you need to hunt for a specific toggle to switch it on.
Access the Privacy & Security tab from the panel on the left.
You should see a checkbox next to an option that reads “Tell websites not to sell or share my data.” This is what you’re looking for.
Chrome
As of this writing, Google Chrome does not offer a built-in toggle or native support for GPC. However, you can install a third-party browser extension like the Privacy Badger by EFF or DuckDuckGo Search & Tracker Protection to enable Global Privacy Control very easily.
Once you find it, click Add to Chrome. Make sure to enable any required permissions for the extension to work too.
Edge
As with Chrome, Microsoft Edge users must also rely on third-party extensions to enable Global Privacy Control. And like before, you can choose between Privacy Badger or the DuckDuckGo extension to activate this feature.
Click Get, followed by Add extension.
The difference between GPC and an ad blocker
At this point, you might be wondering if there’s any difference between this and just using an ad or cookie blocker extension on your web browser. Well, there are a few important distinctions.
Finally, ad blockers are very likely to break functionality on websites that rely on certain cookies or trackers to work as intended. Since GPC is a request rather than a blocking mechanism, it preserves existing functionality while sending a legal notification to websites that they may not share your data with anyone.
When you’re enabling Global Privacy Control instead of using an anti-tracking app or ad blocker, you’re trading coverage and effectiveness for convenience. You’ll have to just trust that websites will honor your privacy preferences, which many don’t, even when they are required to. For example, Disney just settled a $2.75 million lawsuit with the California AG’s office because it didn’t honor opt-out requests for logged-in users on every device like it was supposed to.
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