Microsoft Adds 'Do Not Track' Option For IE9 179
devbox writes "Microsoft says it will offer a privacy setting in the next version of Internet Explorer that will make it easy for users to keep their browsing habits from being tracked by advertising networks and other third-party websites. 'By designing these sorts of enhancements with privacy in mind at the design phase, we're able to deliver a functionality that provides consumers additional levels of control over what they want to engage in and how they choose to do so,' Microsoft Chief Privacy Strategist Peter Cullen blogged. Previously, Mozilla stopped working on a similar feature for Firefox after pressure from advertisers and other OSS projects as it would hurt their revenue sources from advertisers."
Wow, pretty impressed. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a more than a little impressed that MS is going ahead with this. Hopefully this is all the excuse they need over at Mozilla to reconsider their decision.
Microsoft doesn't need ads (Score:0, Insightful)
Sure, they would love to make big dollars on ads (Bing), but IE9 as part of their renewed effort in the browser wars, is already paid for thanks to Windows. Microsoft's privacy policies are superior to most of their competitors. I know it's cool to hate on Microsoft, and it's often deserved, but in the realm of personal privacy a trust them a bit more than I would groups like google or mozilla firefox(funded by google), who's business revolves around collecting your information.
Re:You forgot the parenthetic on that... (Score:4, Insightful)
It may not have been distortion, but if so please provide source.
More Theater (Score:2, Insightful)
This is pointless for systems designed to collect fingerprints of your systems in ways that "iesnare" does. Each time you visit a site your computer gets "processed" and that information is stored on a remote server and shared to all in network servers. There is zero need to store it on your computer because your computers fingerprint will remain static enough to track you anyways. There are so many ways to track and catalog machines its not even funny. This is PURE THEATER designed to do nothing more than make people feel better without actually doing anything to secure their identities or habits!
FireFox has a Do Not Track Addon (Score:5, Insightful)
If websites wanted to make money from advertising DO IT FROM YOUR OWN SITE and dont take the cheap way out, and people relying on generic advertising for an income better get some business sense and stop complaining your not making any money.
Re:server-side tracking (Score:5, Insightful)
Beside, while maybe not relevant for the whole world, I'm currently living in Asia and every country I've been has heavy proxies for surfing. Squid everywhere, you basically cannot get your own ip. And because Asia as a region has billions of users and so few ip's, tracking by ip just doesn't work on individual basis.
Re:Wow, pretty impressed. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft doesn't need ads (Score:5, Insightful)
For the same reason that they started investing in IE in the first place. Netscape made a big deal of how 'browser apps' were going to turn the PC into a thin client and make the desktop OS interchangeable. Now, FireFox, Safari and Chrome, are going on about how 'web apps' are going to make the browser more important than the OS for the software that it can run.
IE9 isn't there as a browser, it's there to sell Windows. Microsoft doesn't mind if you run FireFox on Windows, except that doing so means that it's much easier for you to switch to Mac, *NIX, or whatever. If all of your apps are web apps, then there is no lock in. This is why the IE team is suddenly enthusiastic about HTML5 - if people are going to write HTML5-based web apps (which, it seems, they are), then Microsoft wants to ensure that they run best on Windows (with or without IE, it doesn't matter to them).
It's the same reason that MS invests so much effort in developer tools. They don't make a profit, but they make it more likely that people will have some compelling reason to buy Windows.
Re:Wow, pretty impressed. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a more than a little impressed that MS is going ahead with this. Hopefully this is all the excuse they need over at Mozilla to reconsider their decision.
While I like this move, I don't think MS is being truly altruistic about this. They're looking at their bottom line. MS is not an advertiser, and they don't operate open source projects that are dependent on advertising. So, they have very little to lose by implementing this. On the other side, their rivals have a lot to lose. Look at their main rivals - open source in general (in the form of OpenOffice, Linux, Firefox, and MySQL to name a few), Google (an advertiser), and Apple. Allowing their browser to block advertising directly affects the viability of open source projects and affects the bottom line of Google. It doesn't hurt Apple, but they'll just need to find another way to stick it to Apple when they can.
I just find it a little bit ironic that open source communities are advocating for advertising while mega-corp Microsoft is now in favor of allowing users to block it. It seems a little weird on the surface, but it makes financial sense. I doubt Mozilla will reconsider because they rely more on advertising revenue than Microsoft does. I could see Opera or Apple implementing this though, for the same reasons. I highly doubt Mozilla or Google would add this into their browsers, although the presence of AdBlock makes the point sort of moot for Mozilla. I would be pretty shocked if a version of Chrome showed up with this feature though.
Re:server-side tracking (Score:5, Insightful)
The question is do people really want the lack of personalization that anonymity implies.
Turn on anonymity and get google in a random language, based on the country of the proxy server you are connecting to google from, or get search results that are skewed based on what you have searched for and to a lesser extent, what has been searched for from your ipaddress. If a slashdot searches on google for boa, one of the top results is an IDE for python. I suspect that for a user that spends most of their time searching for the interests of seven year olds they could get a harry potter link in the top ten.
For a website that makes no personalization, and is just looking to scrape data to sell to advertisers, sure, there is basically no reason not to use anonymization software.
The reason that google gets so much information is that their services work better if you give them a fair amount of information, The fact that they do this quietly without you having to click a million checkboxes is viewed as a good thing by people that are stressed for time.
The viability of anonymization is very dependent on what the user is doing, and which sites they are using. The problems for people promoting anonymity also include: anonymizing tends to be slower than regular browsing (tor, for example); Anonymization tends to be work; Most people, most of the time, don't care about their surfing habits.
Another problem is the lack of awareness that the net is not all love and happiness. For example, most reporters, including several linux focused reporters, first reported that the solution to firesheep was to use WEP, without understanding that as soon as the packet goes out on the net it is at least as vulnerable as an unprotected wireless lan, and possibly more so, as wireless networks are somewhat more unstable due to electrical interference an dpor signal quality on a lot of wireless networks.
I just don't see how anonymous browsing gets traction, unless there is civil unrest NATO countries, or some other compelling external event to make people care about their privacy.
I don't mean to be a downer, but I have watched a lot of not too difficult things never catch on. (https on all authenticated connections, pgp, tor, personalized certificates, and more)
Re:server-side tracking (Score:2, Insightful)
You can go on and on about it, but what you're saying is like fire department is completely useless because they can only stop 99% of fires.
Re:Wow, pretty impressed. (Score:5, Insightful)
If the strategy worked ideally, it would demolish Google's revenues because they're unable to collect information about users and their ads aren't being seen by as many eyeballs. That's Google's bread and butter business right there. The reason for the existence of both Android and Chrome OS is to prevent this kind of lockout from happening. Android isn't completely under Google's control so it is possible to lock them out (See the Android phone that uses Bing for search and stories about Verizon possibly considering replacing the Android Marketplace with their own store.) if various third parties wanted to, but Chrome OS seems to be under Google's control to a larger extent at this point.
Google is smart and they realize that their position is open to attack, which is part of the reason they've been expanding into so many other areas and will continue to look for new ways to expose customers to their ads or gather information about users that can be used for targeted advertisements.