Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft's Ad Team Trumps IE Developers' Privacy Aims
phantomfive writes "The company everyone loves to hate is after your private information, as the Wall Street Journal reports. The IE8 design team had planned on adding the best privacy features available, but the advertising executives wanted to track users. From the story: 'In the end, the product planners lost a key part of the debate. The winners: executives who argued that giving automatic privacy to consumers would make it tougher for Microsoft to profit from selling online ads. Microsoft built its browser so that users must deliberately turn on privacy settings every time they start up the software.'"
Hardly..
And how exactly is this different than what Chrome or Firefox does? Last time I checked, you had to actively enable the privacy feature for each session in all browsers...
Karma cannot be described by words alone.
When was Microsoft profiting from selling online ads? Maybe I just missed it, but I thought that they actually had real products and weren't just some spooty ad company trying to ingratiate themselves on the world with free swag? Actually, they hardly seem to have ingratiated themselves with anyone for any reason.
I wouldn't be surprised if the real reason is they're afraid that it would be seen as an anti-competitive move against Google, which is basically just a spooty ad company trying to ingratiate itself on the world with free swag. Otherwise, I see no reason for them not to make delivering ads 10x harder, thus sticking it to the GOOG.
when they have WGA/WPA?
The article is focusing on this:
The Journal's examination of the top 50 most popular U.S. websites showed that Microsoft placed third-party tracking devices on 27 of the top 46 sites that it doesn't itself own.
It's about tracking your movements/interests, harvesting that data and then using that data to advertise to you better ... which usually means handing it off to those advertisers to better target you. And they're not the only ones:
Many also have big stakes in online advertising. Microsoft bought aQuantive, a Web-ad firm, in 2007 for more than $6 billion, to build a business selling ads online. Google, already a giant in online marketing, in September 2008 launched a Web browser, Chrome, that gives it new insight into Internet users' habits. Apple has launched an ad network, iAds, for its iPhone and iPad. And Adobe last year paid $1.8 billion to buy Omniture, which measures the effectiveness of online ads.
WGA/WPA isn't going to get a hold of this kind of data. That's a sort of digital rights management for validating Windows, not tracking users with cookies and making bank off of it. They profit when they sell you Windows (with IE8) and they'll profit when you use IE8 on the internet.
My work here is dung.
A company that values revenues over customer satisfaction... this and other news at 11...
I guess somebody thinks that knowing more about less eyeballs is more profitable. I suppose there's a possibility that may work for a while ... a short while.
'In the end, the product planners lost a key part of the debate. The winners: executives who argued that giving automatic privacy to consumers would make it tougher for Google to profit from selling online ads. Google built its browser so that users must deliberately turn on privacy settings every time they start up the software.'
Birds fly...
fish swim...
and people...
Upper managment meddles. That's what they do.
IE8 fails for me for one simple reason, that stupid button to remove an entry from the address bar. The number of times I've clicked on the drop down button, moved the cursor down to the line I want and clicked, only for it to remove the entry rather than navigating to it. Why they couldn't they have put that icon on the left side instead is beyond me.
Granted I only use IE8 for testing our in-house software but it's still a hair pulling experience.
Summation 2
Those few browser users who actually care about their privacy have already taken steps to safeguard it, at least to some degree that they are comfortable with. MS releasing yet another version of IE that makes it easy for them or others to violate that privacy is not news. It's just business as usual.
MSFT has designed yet another piece of software you'd have to be a complete idiot to use.
Cue Firefox/Chrome extension implementing this feature in 3...2...1...
In the meantime, Google for Ghostery, which blocks tracking tools using a blacklist. I've had it disabled actually because I figured adblock + a hosts file would do enough for me. But in honor of this article I will re-enable it.
"At the keynote today at SXSW, Microsoft's Danah Boyd placed a lot of emphasis on Google's privacy "fails" with Buzz. The topic of the keynote was the relationship between privacy and publicity, and she certainly covered much more territory and social media in general, but it was interesting that Google Buzz was essentially the first thing talked about"
Who's Messing With the Google Book Settlement? Hint: They're in Redmond, Washington
Here at Microsoft we half ass our software on purpose. It's a feature... for us.. you, not so much.
Seriously I could shake down every customer that walked through my door to buy a item by forcing them to disclose all their private info. That would work great until the shop next to me offers a better product and is just happy to do business with people.
Or because the average user is running around the Internet looking for instant gratification and simply won't learn about security.
But what if that's changing?
We can bitch and moan about how worthless Facebook is but these privacy debacles seem to finally be waking people up to the real issues at stake. Thankfully to raise this issue it took just a few sensitive pictures of some fools to get out after they posted them to the world instead of a totally invasive all knowing nexus of everyone's everything. Seems like the past 20 or so years it's slowly been getting worse and worse on the internet. And now WSJ has this huge "expose" called What They Know with an intuitive display of what's affecting you without your knowledge. And that indicates that WSJ thinks people want to hear about this and that it will sell eyeballs. I say it's about damned time. I hope it doesn't stop here with Microsoft or even stop at browsers. It should continue from websites all the way back to The Patriot Act. Hopefully the spirit of privacy from government and corporations has merely been sleeping in Americans and not completely dead/relinquished. Unfortunately they say it's always much harder to win back liberties lost than to give them up.
My work here is dung.
They are currently king of the jungle and everyone knows it. The problem is, their kingdom is weakening and predictions are saying that Microsoft is the new (whatever previous king...IBM, Novell, whatever). A large part of the cause of this is Microsoft's lacking of good will. Microsoft is falling out of favor with its users. It's a growing problem for them and it's time they started trying to rebuild it.
Setting their browser to block ads by default would not hurt their cash cows (MS Office and MS Windows) but would certainly hurt their ad revenue... and other people's ad revenue as well... others like Google.
Now that I think about it, if they did use their browser to block ads, they might find themselves target of more anti-trust litigation.
A retrospective positive spin on how MS is about trashing your privacy in the interests of generating revenue, as it always was.
..
In early 2008, Microsoft Corp.'s product planners for the Internet Explorer 8.0 browser intended to give users a simple, effective way to avoid being tracked online. They wanted to design the software to automatically thwart common tracking tools, unless a user deliberately switched to settings affording less privacy. That triggered heated debate inside Microsoft
Where did this happen, who were involved in the design stage, what were their names. Is their any verifiable citations for all of this? I follow the technology and I never heard of whiff of this.
As the leading maker of Web browsers, the gateway software to the Internet
Since when? Firefox, Opera are equal if not better, and have been for some time.
Microsoft built its browser so that users must deliberately turn on privacy settings every time they start up the software.
Where are these hidden privacy settings, all I see is a `Pop-up Blocker', a `Phishing Filter' `and Manage-Addons'
"Microsoft's original privacy plans for the new Explorer were "industry-leading" and technically superior to privacy features in earlier browsers, says Simon Davies, a privacy-rights advocate in the U.K. whom Microsoft consulted while forming its browser privacy plans"
Look all is going on here is Microsoft quoting a bogus puff piece erroneously stating that IE was "industry-leading" some time in the past, presumably in some parallel universe. When did MS innovate time travel ? Slashdot why are you wasting space giving free advertising space for Microsofts` Browser.
Ads are one of the places where we clearly see the rise of corporatism. Cyberpunk was right in the general direction, that corporations would become more important and then more powerful than governments, but wrong in how it would manifest. There will be no corporate wars (they're not profitable). The enemy of a corporation is not another corporation - it's the consumer. Wolves kill rabbits a lot more often than they kill other wolves. Amongst your peers, threats and displays of power work a lot better to establish hierarchy and territory than actual battle does. It's the prey that you hunt and kill, not your competitors.
We will be seeing a lot more like this. Consumer rights are being erroded all around the world, while corporate rights are being strengthened.
And I don't even consider myself a leftist - for you americans, if you read your actual history you'll find that several of the founding fathers wanted to outlaw corporations entirely, and the original compromise was to grant them temporary existence. Funny how the conservatives should be up in arms a lot more than the leftists are.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Yet again, Microsoft let money get in the way of their users privacy and security.
I didn't even know what Inprivate Filtering was until I read this article and the fact that it is turned off every time you restart IE makes it pretty much useless.
I'm not regretting my decision to use Firefox for everything.
I am wary of Google Chrome for the same reason.. Google, even more so than MS make money from advertising online.
Firefox too derives much revenue indirectly from advertising, through their google sponsorship...
At least the source code for these browsers is available, giving users the opportunity to check the code over and provide third party builds with better privacy features, something you can't do with IE.
There's always Opera if you want a closed source browser, since they aren't an ad broker.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I dont care if microsoft know my browsing habits. As long as they don't publish the websites I visit together with my name and address I really do not care if im being tracked. If I ever want to do anything under the radar I know how, but I have never been in that situation.
This would have been infuriating news several years ago before
- Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg ordered members private information made public, without consent, without notice, without apology and then told people they would learn to like it.
- Google enrolling people into buzz by default exposing information about them to people who they might not want to see it.
- Yahoo, giving you notice, but mining your address book for its social network, information you thought would never be used.
Microsoft leaving some privacy stuff out or turned off by default makes very limp new these days. Zuckerberg did raise the bar
Seriously, is anyone on /. using IE anyway? Firefox with adblock and noscript is all you need. As long as MS doesn't go all Apple and try to stop me from installing an alternate brower, who really gives a shit?
Sure it screws over those who use IE. But those who use IE have been getting screwed over for a long time. So what's new?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
not that i needed another reason to use firefox, but thanks MS, for putting another nail in the coffin of IE.
I don't really care about their motives or what they did. Hell, I avoid their software because of what they've done in the past, they have at least 10 years of spotless behaviour ahead of them before they ever even get back to the "Well, I'll consider them" phase.
More importantly, is the "targetted" advertising and tracking information that they can gather really that worthwhile? What's the stats on un-targetted versus targetted advertising in any medium - online, TV, radio? Obviously, it's not a good idea to target condom advertising in between Teletubbies episodes but does the reverse really have a much-worse response rate than normal? Where is the value in collecting that massive amount of data? Google has oodles and oodles and oodles of advert targeting data if it wants to use it - but almost all Google Adwords I see aren't related to me at all and when you want to show your ads, it's more common to let you choose keywords, target demographics or just let things happen pretty much randomly and in the cheapest spots than it is to target your football-related ads on football sites.
If I go to LWN.net NOW, I get these ads: Cloud Computing Linux, SysAdmin role in London, Linux VPS, Peer 1 UK Managed Hosting, Linux Unmanaged VPS, CHILImodule (A linux-based computer), "Server hosting from staff who care", HPC Linux Servers, TomCat support, Free Code Security Support
What targetted data could possibly have been used to show me those ads? The word Linux (in the sitename, I'm actually browsing from Windows in work and typed in the URL directly!), and my GeoIP (or, at least, my employer's GeoIP for their main proxy server). What's worth spending BILLIONS on infrastructure and data collection to put ads on a high-traffic Linux website that display to a London, UK user related to : London, UK and Linux.
Fluke? Let me try my brother's site - a Scouting site whose URL is www.scoutingresources.org.uk : Scout Uniforms for Sale, Ventures Abroad, Free Life Coach Training, Resellers Bookbuying tool, Scout & Guide Neckers, Names Badges and Lanyards, Cubs Laser Tag Fun, Scouting Activities, London Coupons, Scout Uniform.
So, actually, with Google's "Targetted Ad's", we end up with 3 ad's that aren't at all related to scouting (the other has various links to it) - only one of which is linked to the GeoIP, most of the Scouting links were actually for US Scouting which is vastly different, and the two remaining tenuous links are pretty-much random fillers. Considering that sites earns it's entire hosting budget + a couple of camps for the kids every year from just the Google Ad's alone, that's pretty damning of ad-targeting technology.
Seriously, what does collecting ad-targetting data in this manner get you that you couldn't from a quick keyword analysis and Geo IP lookup?
greed always trumps prudence in for-profit company's products
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
If it is for purely advertising purposes, what is the problem? This "privacy-invasion" isn't new : Google and many other companies have been employing for long time now. With respect to web browsers, I believe Google Chrome browser also collects information---I think they went public about this too.
What is the problem? Don't like it? Use Firefox.
1. Turn on InPrivate Filtering by hitting Ctrl+Shift+F 2. A registry key will be created: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Safety\PrivacIE 3. Create a DWORD (32-bit) called StartMode under this key 4. The following values for StartMode correspond to settings for InPrivate Filtering: (Off = 0, Auto = 1, Manual = 2)
Well, that 70% would still be over twice as large as that of all competitors combined.
Marketing people making design decisions about a browser just reminds me of the slow downfall of the American auto makers due in large part to marketing and accountants affecting car designs.
Microsoft's primary goal is to make money. Their primary goal is not to make Google make less money.
Microsoft and Google make more money is better for Microsoft than Microsoft and Google make less money, even if the less disproportionately affects Google.
paintball
Every time someone comes to me with a computer that was infected via web pages in IE I manage to convince them to convert to FF with Ad-block.
Keep it up M$ and I'll have the world converted eventually.
old news since this is SOP for Microsoft since the '80s. "DOS ain't done until X won't run." this is just the same old MS.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Setting their browser to block ads by default would not hurt their cash cows (MS Office and MS Windows) but would certainly hurt their ad revenue... and other people's ad revenue as well... others like Google.
As a contrast, Safari/Apple Inc. is less involved with Ad-revenue, so they allow blocking of tracking components that MS AD department is too big to "ignore." Because there was no antitrust breakup of Microsoft after all the 1990's fuss, we see how now we all suffer from one more of these broken, corporation-centric design decisions.
The breakup would have caused "Microsoft /OS Inc" to be the logical buyer to all non-software assets, and "Microsoft /Software Dev Inc" to be [supposedly more] immune to the other's whims.
Just another reason to avoid paying the Microsoft Tax. Vote with your pocket book - don't purchase and/or install MS products! There are (for the most part) alternatives!
"Microsoft built its browser so that users must deliberately turn on privacy settings every time they start up the software."
Therefore, yet again, the Marketing Morons have managed to screw up something else. By all means treat the customer as a source of cash and nothing more.
Then consider the fact that Microsoft is currently run by a Marketing Moron, Steve Ballmer. This is how companies die.
A Marketing Maven treats the customer with respect. They know the customer pays the bills and keeps the company running and dictates what is good product and what is bad. The customer runs the show.
Or because the average user is running around the Internet looking for instant gratification and simply won't learn about security. You might as well try to teach a clown with a condom on his nose.
The average user should not need the skills of a hacker to surf the net.
That expectation is unrealistic and downright unfair.
You cannot expect the average person to be able to protect themselves from all the intelligent, creative, and motivated hackers.
Also consider what a pain it is to filter with all the 3rd-party tools that web designers have to use on a site. Just look at your cookies and all the external sites a web page connects to. You could allow all, or block all, or decide on each one, or use some addon that decides for you. None of these options are a perfect solution.
Another example.. 'Windows has detected a virus. Would you like to download and install the repair tool? Yes / No ' ..How on earth would the average user know if this pop-up was real or fake?
You simply cannot blame people if they are ignorant of internet security. And it it not just hackers they need to protect themselves from. Corporations just want to squeeze every cent they can from content. So they sell ad space, your browsing history, your contact information, your sex quiz results, etc.
But this is the world we live in. Users want content and don't want to pay. Content owners want to be paid for providing a service, so they have to use an ancillary market.
oldhack: "Security is a waste of money until shit hits the fan. 5 minutes later, it becomes waste of money again. "
.
Good one - Dick Head.
.
Voting up, Voting down - If I really gave a fuck about your approval or not, I'd come and ask you.
How about going back to basic Internet technology as an approach to help solve this? Most of us know about the host file. Let's spread the word about what can be achieved with that. It can help reduce many threats, including tracking. And it's totally platform independent. Here is an example of what can be done easily for most people: http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm Download it, read a bit and get rid of ads, banners, 3rd party Cookies, 3rd party page counters, web bugs, and even most hijackers. Many others can be found. Heck, you could even manage it yourself like I used to back then if you are masochist. The only drawback is that it makes some pages look real ugly. But then, do you actually need to go there if it is so riddled with garbage?