Google: IE Privacy Policy Is Impractical

itwbennett writes "In response to Microsoft's claim that Google circumvented Internet Explorer privacy protections (following the discovery that Google also worked around Safari's privacy settings), Google on Monday said that IE's privacy protection, called P3P, is impractical to comply with."

Comments

Impractical to who?

[scruffy]

I suppose privacy is impractical to those who want to sell our personal information.

Re:Microsoft Quality

[betterunixthanunix]

Frankly, as an approach to a security engineering problem, P3P is pretty bad. You are basically allowing your adversary to declare what the security policy will be, then leaving it up to your adversary to follow that policy.

If browser makers were serious about protecting their users' privacy, they would make adblocking the default, they would have stricter cookies policies, and they would not let a company like Google decide what sort of privacy people will have.

misleading/wrong question

[poetmatt]

The question that should be asked is: Why does IE have some part of their framework in place which can be simply ignored/violated?

Re:misleading/wrong question

[Desler]

Yeah how dare they implement the P3P standard as it tells them to! Google is using a loophole in the standard to bypass the privacy protection.

Re:Impractical to Microsoft, MS also send invalid

[Americano]

User: "I don't wish to be tracked. I've opted out using this P3P setting."
Google: "Haha there's a loophole that we're gonna use to track you anyway. Blame Microsoft if you don't like it, sucker!"

Yep, Google has done nothing wrong here whatsoever. They're completely right to exploit a known loophole which allows them to disregard the wishes of the users accessing their services, if those wishes would make Google's services less profitable.

If this is "Do no evil," I shudder to think about the damage Google could do if they decided one day to deliberately engage in evil.