The tech-focused think tank on Friday that detects whether visitors have do-not-track features enabled in their browsers and tells them their request has been denied.

"Do Not Track is a detrimental policy that undermines the economic foundation of the Internet," Daniel Castro, senior analyst at the ITIF wrote in a blog post. "Advertising revenue supports most of the free content, services, and apps available on the Internet."

Behavioral advertising, which tracks Web users in order to deliver relevant advertising to them, is a service in which "everyone wins," he added. "Ad-supported websites increase their revenue, users receive fewer irrelevant ads and more free content, and advertisers get to be in front of their target audiences."

Many websites do not honor browser do-not-track requests, Castro said. "We are just being explicit about it," he said in an email.

Firefox and recent versions of Internet Explorer include do-not-track options for users. Google plans to implement do-not-track in its Chrome browser.