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Microsoft Accuses Google of Violating Internet Explorer's Privacy Settings

Posted by Soulskill on from the capitalizing-on-bad-publicity dept.

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."

1 of 197 comments (clear)

  1. Re:IE's fault? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    Internet Explorer is the only thing breaking a W3C standard here.

    P3P has been flagged as deprecated since 2007, and not to be used.

    ALL the other browsers out there can follow the standards just fine, yet IE breaks it by honoring tags that are specifically documented as not to be used.

    This is no different than all the websites that work perfect in standards compliant browsers but broke in IE, so they use javascript or server side detection to send totally different HTML just to get IE to display it in the first place.

    Are you trying to claim it is the websites fault for having to do that just to support IE, and NOT the fault of IE for not working correctly?