Every few months, the subject of Internet privacy and browser tracking in particular makes top headlines in the tech press. The latest bout of privacy and tracking news surround newly released best-practice guidelines from the FTC, which are intended to give consumers "greater control over the collection and use of their personal data."

While these are recommendations rather than regulations at this point, many observers believe that, if they have no effect, regulations will come later through congressional action.

The report has drawn fire from both sides, with business interests saying the practices it suggests will kill the Internet, which is fueled by targeted advertising. From the other side, privacy advocates such as the Electronic Privacy Information Center have stated that the new guidelines don't go as far as the earlier Privacy Bill of Rights proposed by the White House.

With all the commotion in the tech press these days, it's worthwhile to take a look at where the browsers stand right now in terms of their ability to protect you from being tracked by Web behavioral marketing companies. The major browsers have taken different approaches to protecting you from being tracked. At present, only Internet Explorer and Firefox have actually built tracking protection into the browser; Chrome lags here, though Google has stated that it will eventually build in some form of tracking protection.

First out of the gate was Microsoft's Tracking Protection in Internet Explorer 9. The feature, announced in December of 2010, lets users subscribe to blacklists from organizations like TRUSTe and PrivacyChoice to block third-party tracking sites from placing cookies on your PC's hard drive.

Mozilla took a different approach with Firefox, announcing its Do Not Track option in late January 2011. Firefox's solution lets users check a settings option that will send a header message to sites expressing their wish not to be tracked. Mozilla claimed that the blacklist approach wasn't viable, since advertisers could constantly change URLs. Microsoft would probably counter that the blacklist subscriptions could be continually updated to reflect the new URLs.

To test how well each feature protects you from tracking right now, I turned on each browser's tracking protection feature, and enabled each one's developer tools, which showed network traffic as I browsed. For Firefox, this simply meant checking the box in Settings that says, "Tell websites I do not want to be tracked." For IE9, I turned on Tracking Protection, using the first block list I found, from Abine. I then browsed around  PCMag.com, which like pretty much every site, uses DoubleClick and Google Ads.

Here's what I saw in the Network Activity window with IE9's tracking protection enabled:

Notice how there's a 0 byte exchange for DoubleClick and Google Ads, which also show Aborted in the result column. Looks like those ad trackers aren't getting through.

With Firefox's Do Not Track enabled, here's what I saw:

You can see that DoubleClick and Google Ads cookies are happily being placed on my system, even though Firefox's Do Not Track feature was enabled. The same activity was being blocked by Internet Explorer's Tracking Protection.

I realize that the Do Not Track guidelines from the FTC and White House have not been put into place yet. But Mozilla's Firefox feature has been around for a year, and still, the ad companies aren't respecting the consumer's wish not to be tracked. Of course, this could change, with the Digital Advertising Alliance's agreement to honor Do Not Track guidelines. But right now, it looks like IE9 is the only browser that effectively prevents ad-network tracking.

For more, see Hands On With AVG's 'Do Not Track' Tool.

For more from Michael, follow him on Twitter @mikemuch.