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."
Re:server-side tracking (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think you quite understand how it works - the idea is not only to keep them from reading stuff off your machine but also some level of anonymization on the net.
Right now the big practice is to put tracking cookies on your computer. Seriously, let your parents browse the web unfiltered and unrestricted for about a month, then do a good Antivirus scan and if you come back with any less than 100 tracking cookies I'll be surprised.
So thats one issue they are trying to tackle. The other one is as you said, what happens when my information is being tracked on the server? That's where anonymizing protocols come in handy. You are never the same person twice when visiting the web site, you always appear to be a new client. As such, they'll never have previous records on your computer.
Couple that with an increase usage of HTTPS possibly built into the browser, and no third party adserver can "snoop" what goes on between you and the server. Brilliant.
HTTP header (Score:4, Interesting)
How about we just have an HTTP header that, if present in the request, states exactly which tracking the user consents to? No ambiguity, easy to implement on both the browser and the server side. End of problem. At least for users, and since it's our data I don't see where any other party should be getting a say in how it's used.
Playing Devil's Advocate, and I do mean Devil. (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, it's in Microsoft's interest for something like this to work, and work well.
I've mentioned before that I believe this is the best way for MS to fight Google. (Since MS is a software company, Google is an ad company. Why try to fight them with a search engine, it misses the point.)
Add an ad-blocker to IE, built in, on by default (in addition to this bug-blocker.) Single button on the toolbar to turn ads back on, with options for finer-grained settings.
Microsoft can then go further. Allow an opt-in user-requested ad feature, where the ads are served by the browser for participating websites. Users can set what type of ads they want (no anim, no sound, for example), white- or black-list products or companies, and list areas of interest. Advertisers will hate the user control, but because people have asked for the ads, and are thus more likely to trust the network, that increases both click-through and sales, so advertisers would generally pay more. That also means more money per-ad for websites, increasing their participation. etc etc. Users win, websites win, advertisers win.
Meanwhile, if most Firefox users use ABP, and all IE-default-setting users have ads blocked, that leaves only Chrome users to give Google their ad-revenue. Less money means less research, less innovation, more rivals, fragmented market. Microsoft wins.
Re:MS Stands Up For Users?! (Score:2, Interesting)
Sure you can complain about IE6 not meeting the HTML and CSS standards, but you'd be wrong. Because there were no standards, MS tried to push web into new era (and succeeded! - think AJAX), but W3C was slow to publish standards.
Re:You forgot the parenthetic on that... (Score:5, Interesting)