Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
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.
It's not a typo if you understood the meaning!
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.
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.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
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)
Work bio at MMWD