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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.'"
You can modify the shortcut for IE or Chrome to start in private/incognito mode all the time (no need to set it on each program startup). Problem is, 99% of the planet wouldn't know/understand how to do this and this is the issue, if geeks can avoid tracking with ad blocking and incognito mode and whatnot, the average browser user can't. If IE really wanted to distance themselves from other browsers, they would have made privacy an opt-out feature, instead an opt-in.
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
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.
On the downside, this would probably kill projects like Google hosting common JavaScript libraries so sites can reference them and decrease page loads as users cache them elsewhere - in fact it would be worse than having no caching at all, it would strip the JavaScript out completely after the 10th site (unless they came up with a system of whitelisting such projects, which would carry management overheads, or ignoring certain files, in which case ad providers would just make their files look like the exceptions, etc).
I don't know about that. Ballmer, in response to questions about the iPad, said that Apple was selling more than he'd like them to. Now what kind of perverted Business School Product thinks like that...probably all of them. Presumably if Apple wasn't selling any, he'd be uninterested in the segment. This goes a long way in explaining what is wrong about MS.