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.'"

Comments

Re:What do they need tracking in IE8 for

[eldavojohn]

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.