Microsoft Adds 'Do Not Track' Option For IE9

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."

Comments

You forgot the parenthetic on that...

[retech]

(except for us)

Re:You forgot the parenthetic on that...

[Anonymous Coward]

There should be a mod category for posts that play on popular opinion while distorting facts.
It may not have been distortion, but if so please provide source.

Re:You forgot the parenthetic on that...

[RobertM1968]

Odd, when every malformed URL has went to MS since time immemorial. And odd, that if you read their privacy statement, TOS, and EULA, you will find they claim to have the right to do exactly these things.

Do you suspect they actually dont do those things, but just like mentioning (errr... burying) them in their various docs about their products and services?

Re:You forgot the parenthetic on that...

[h4rm0ny]

I'll use the browser if it does that. Microsoft make their main money from selling software. Firefox and Chrome make their money from Google which makes its money from tracking what you do and selling the information. We're more likely to see a privacy-respecting browser from MS than from Google, as unlike with Google, it doesn't contradict their core business model.

Wow, pretty impressed.

[nametaken]

I'm a more than a little impressed that MS is going ahead with this. Hopefully this is all the excuse they need over at Mozilla to reconsider their decision.

Re:Wow, pretty impressed.

[SuricouRaven]

Perhaps the other way around? Microsoft realised how dependant OSS projects are on advertising, and tried to find a good way to hurt them? Though rather pointless, as the people who visit sites like Slashdot arn't going to be running IE anyway.

Re:Wow, pretty impressed.

[amicusNYCL]

I'm a more than a little impressed that MS is going ahead with this. Hopefully this is all the excuse they need over at Mozilla to reconsider their decision.

While I like this move, I don't think MS is being truly altruistic about this. They're looking at their bottom line. MS is not an advertiser, and they don't operate open source projects that are dependent on advertising. So, they have very little to lose by implementing this. On the other side, their rivals have a lot to lose. Look at their main rivals - open source in general (in the form of OpenOffice, Linux, Firefox, and MySQL to name a few), Google (an advertiser), and Apple. Allowing their browser to block advertising directly affects the viability of open source projects and affects the bottom line of Google. It doesn't hurt Apple, but they'll just need to find another way to stick it to Apple when they can.

I just find it a little bit ironic that open source communities are advocating for advertising while mega-corp Microsoft is now in favor of allowing users to block it. It seems a little weird on the surface, but it makes financial sense. I doubt Mozilla will reconsider because they rely more on advertising revenue than Microsoft does. I could see Opera or Apple implementing this though, for the same reasons. I highly doubt Mozilla or Google would add this into their browsers, although the presence of AdBlock makes the point sort of moot for Mozilla. I would be pretty shocked if a version of Chrome showed up with this feature though.

Re:Wow, pretty impressed.

[alvinrod]

MS isn't being altruistic about this at all. It's a direct shot at Google, most specifically targeting how Google generates revenue. If they really wanted to turn the heat up, they could ship the browser with an ad blocker as well. Microsoft has finally realized that it's not going to unseat Google. If they can't have that money, why not deprive Google of it as well?

If the strategy worked ideally, it would demolish Google's revenues because they're unable to collect information about users and their ads aren't being seen by as many eyeballs. That's Google's bread and butter business right there. The reason for the existence of both Android and Chrome OS is to prevent this kind of lockout from happening. Android isn't completely under Google's control so it is possible to lock them out (See the Android phone that uses Bing for search and stories about Verizon possibly considering replacing the Android Marketplace with their own store.) if various third parties wanted to, but Chrome OS seems to be under Google's control to a larger extent at this point.

Google is smart and they realize that their position is open to attack, which is part of the reason they've been expanding into so many other areas and will continue to look for new ways to expose customers to their ads or gather information about users that can be used for targeted advertisements.

That's a position?

[Monkeedude1212]

How many companies even HAVE a Chief Privacy Strategist? Where do you go to school for that? I can only imagine a Computer Science Degree with a high focus on networking and security - but even those don't always focus on the issues of PRIVACY on the internet.

Can I get a job at Apple as their Chief Privacy Strategist? I know I could totally just point the Safari team at HTTPS Everywhere, tell them to get crackin', get a better "Secure viewing" mode in that browser. Then walk away with my 6 figure paycheck and get a mention on Slashdot!

MS Stands Up For Users?!

[SaidinUnleashed]

Also, this just in, there are predictions for snowfall in Hell, this evening...

In all seriousness, IT'S ABOUT GODDAMN TIME. Someone needs to stand up to the constant intrusion into our personal habits, and if Microsoft is going to be the first to do so, more power to them. If they do as good of a job on IE9 as they have on Windows 7, it will end up being an awesome browser, anyway.

5 years ago, I would have never believed that those words would have come out of my mouth. Of course, back then, WinXP was their offering, and I was a student intern writing Linux kernel code for credit. Everything changes...

Re:server-side tracking

[Bucky24]

Tracking done on the server side relies on environment variables that the server gets by querying the browser. If the browser refuses to give those variables, tracking can't be done.

FireFox has a Do Not Track Addon

[muphin]

I use Ghostery and Adblock Plus to stop all my tracking and doesnt slow me down one bit, in fact not having to load all those ads speeds up your browsing.
If websites wanted to make money from advertising DO IT FROM YOUR OWN SITE and dont take the cheap way out, and people relying on generic advertising for an income better get some business sense and stop complaining your not making any money.

Re:server-side tracking

[Monkeedude1212]

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.

Re:server-side tracking

[devbox]

Sure, but that's far fetched from the ability that cookies and the likes of Google Analytics offer for marketers. It's stupid to say "this won't end it all" and think it's better to do nothing. Every bit helps, and this is huge step forward. Especially for normal and clueless users.

Beside, while maybe not relevant for the whole world, I'm currently living in Asia and every country I've been has heavy proxies for surfing. Squid everywhere, you basically cannot get your own ip. And because Asia as a region has billions of users and so few ip's, tracking by ip just doesn't work on individual basis.

Re:Microsoft doesn't need ads

[TheRaven64]

For the same reason that they started investing in IE in the first place. Netscape made a big deal of how 'browser apps' were going to turn the PC into a thin client and make the desktop OS interchangeable. Now, FireFox, Safari and Chrome, are going on about how 'web apps' are going to make the browser more important than the OS for the software that it can run.

IE9 isn't there as a browser, it's there to sell Windows. Microsoft doesn't mind if you run FireFox on Windows, except that doing so means that it's much easier for you to switch to Mac, *NIX, or whatever. If all of your apps are web apps, then there is no lock in. This is why the IE team is suddenly enthusiastic about HTML5 - if people are going to write HTML5-based web apps (which, it seems, they are), then Microsoft wants to ensure that they run best on Windows (with or without IE, it doesn't matter to them).

It's the same reason that MS invests so much effort in developer tools. They don't make a profit, but they make it more likely that people will have some compelling reason to buy Windows.

Re:server-side tracking

[micheas]

The question is do people really want the lack of personalization that anonymity implies.

Turn on anonymity and get google in a random language, based on the country of the proxy server you are connecting to google from, or get search results that are skewed based on what you have searched for and to a lesser extent, what has been searched for from your ipaddress. If a slashdot searches on google for boa, one of the top results is an IDE for python. I suspect that for a user that spends most of their time searching for the interests of seven year olds they could get a harry potter link in the top ten.

For a website that makes no personalization, and is just looking to scrape data to sell to advertisers, sure, there is basically no reason not to use anonymization software.

The reason that google gets so much information is that their services work better if you give them a fair amount of information, The fact that they do this quietly without you having to click a million checkboxes is viewed as a good thing by people that are stressed for time.

The viability of anonymization is very dependent on what the user is doing, and which sites they are using. The problems for people promoting anonymity also include: anonymizing tends to be slower than regular browsing (tor, for example); Anonymization tends to be work; Most people, most of the time, don't care about their surfing habits.

Another problem is the lack of awareness that the net is not all love and happiness. For example, most reporters, including several linux focused reporters, first reported that the solution to firesheep was to use WEP, without understanding that as soon as the packet goes out on the net it is at least as vulnerable as an unprotected wireless lan, and possibly more so, as wireless networks are somewhat more unstable due to electrical interference an dpor signal quality on a lot of wireless networks.

I just don't see how anonymous browsing gets traction, unless there is civil unrest NATO countries, or some other compelling external event to make people care about their privacy.

I don't mean to be a downer, but I have watched a lot of not too difficult things never catch on. (https on all authenticated connections, pgp, tor, personalized certificates, and more)

HTTP header

[Todd Knarr]

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.

[FatLittleMonkey]

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.