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Microsoft Accuses Google of Violating Internet Explorer's Privacy Settings
New submitter Dupple writes with a followup to Friday's news that Google was bypassing Safari's privacy settings. Now, Microsoft's Internet Explorer blog has a post accusing Google of doing the same thing (in a different way) to Internet Explorer. Quoting:
"By default, IE blocks third-party cookies unless the site presents a P3P Compact Policy Statement indicating how the site will use the cookie and that the site’s use does not include tracking the user. Google’s P3P policy causes Internet Explorer to accept Google’s cookies even though the policy does not state Google’s intent. P3P, an official recommendation of the W3C Web standards body, is a Web technology that all browsers and sites can support. Sites use P3P to describe how they intend to use cookies and user information. By supporting P3P, browsers can block or allow cookies to honor user privacy preferences with respect to the site’s stated intentions. ... Technically, Google utilizes a nuance in the P3P specification that has the effect of bypassing user preferences about cookies. The P3P specification (in an attempt to leave room for future advances in privacy policies) states that browsers should ignore any undefined policies they encounter. Google sends a P3P policy that fails to inform the browser about Google’s use of cookies and user information. Google’s P3P policy is actually a statement that it is not a P3P policy."
You're splitting hairs here.
P3P 1.0 doesn't allow for multi-site delclarations, only "cross-site" declarations. There can be one -- and only one -- P3P policy; by the standard it doesn't allow but ONE policy and states that others, if present, should be ignored. This just isn't how the Web works these days. Cloud services have pretty much become a defacto standard, but P3P forces site administrators to take a P3P policy from the integrated service and mash it into their own policy (and hope the service policy never changes). This just isn't practical.
A site admin CHOOSES to use +1 buttons and FB like buttons. Inclusion of these objects would optimally prompt an admin to adjust their _own_ P3P policy, but it's just a plain 'ol administrative nightmare to manually take the respective organizations' policies and create a master policy out of all of them. It's fully manual; it has no concept of "merging" policies to present users with enough information to make informed choices on the multitude of SaaS services sites now use. That's the issue.
The darn thing is broken. Period. Hard to claim "cop-out" when dealing with a protocol that's stuck in 2001.