“When the IE team heard that Google had bypassed user privacy settings on Safari, we asked ourselves a simple question: is Google circumventing the privacy preferences of Internet Explorer users too?” IE executive Dean Hachamovitch wrote in a blog post this morning. “We’ve discovered the answer is yes: Google is employing similar methods to get around the default privacy protections in IE and track IE users with cookies.”
The blog post, which details Microsoft’s findings and offers privacy protection tips, said it has contacted Google about its concerns and asked it to “commit to honoring P3P privacy settings for users of all browsers.”
P3P, or Platform for Privacy Preferences, is an official recommendation of the World Wide Web Consortium that sites use to summarize their privacy policies. However, the recommendation has been largely ignored in the past decade since introduction a decade ago with many major Web sites such as Google.com, Apple.com, CNN.com, and Twitter.com opting not to use it to describe their policies.
Microsoft slammed Apple earlier this week after The Wall Street Journal reported that Google had sidestepped Safari user privacy settings to track Internet users. The search giant and other ad companies reportedly used special code to get around Safari’s privacy controls in order to track users on computers and mobile devices.
Thanks to Steven Musil and CNET NEWS, and
Thanks for “listening”
Howard
The Neu Facebook
