Pinterest enables Do Not Track, announces it in a totally unrelated blog post

You gotta love PR and marketing reps sometimes.

Pinterest announced today that it supports Do Not Track, a browser preference that tells sites you don’t want them tracking or collecting information about you via third-party tracking services, such as ad networks, analytics services, and social networks.

And it did so via a throw-away five words in a blog post about a new edit button that will help users make Pinterest more personal.

Pinterest apparently enabled the feature two weeks ago on July 17, according to its help center. But the company didn’t announce it publicly — there’s no record in Google’s cache — until today. Nick Bilton at the NY Times Bits blog spotted it first.

First of all, it’s A Good Thing.

Giving web users the ability to opt out of third-party tracking is important for those who want to protect their privacy, and not allowing third parties to collect information about your users while they’re on your site is just polite — especially if they’ve specifically set a preference in their browser indicating that desire.

Not enough websites support Do Not Track, and it’s great that Pinterest is joining the ones that do.

However, it would mean more if Pinterest had devoted an entire blog post to the topic, instead of just hiding it within a post about a completely different topic. When Twitter implemented the feature, for instance, it publicized the fact in a tweet. Given the fact that Twitter’s main Twitter account has over 21 million followers, that’s a pretty public way to make a statement.

Clearly, however, Pinterest didn’t want to follow suit.