Right now Microsoft published a post on its Net Explorer Engineering Team blog calling out Google for bypassing World wide web Explorer user’s privacy settings.
Final Friday,The Wall Street Journal broke the news that Google has been bypassing privacy settings set by users on Apple’s Safari browser. After hearing this, Microsoft investigated if Google was carrying out the same to Net Explorer. Following some digging, IE’s engineering team got their answer: yes, Google was going over user’s privacy controls.
Particularly, Google has been bypassing Net Explorer’s P3P Privacy Protection feature, which defines how cookies are utilized by browsers and websites. P3P Compact Policy statements are supplied by internet sites to clarify how the web site’s cookies will be impact a visitor’s privacy although browsing. Dean Hachamovitch, corporate Vice President of World wide web Explorer, explains on the IE weblog how the browser handles P3P statements:
By default, IE blocks third-party cookies unless the internet site presents a P3P Compact Policy Statement indicating how the site will use the cookie and that the site’s use does not contain tracking the user. Google’s P3P policy causes Web Explorer to accept Google’s cookies even even though the policy does not state Google’s intent.
The identical scenario arose with Safari: The browser by default blocks third-party cookies and Google bypassed this function. Only time will tell if Firefox users have experienced this privacy issue as well. VentureBeat has reached out to Google and Microsoft, but hasn’t yet received a response.
Microsoft has responded to the scenario with a Tracking Protection List that World wide web Explorer users can add to their browser to maintain track of this sort of activity really should it persist. The link for the list is available on the IE Engineering Team weblog.
These allegations comply with the developing controversy more than Google’s new privacy policy which shares details across all of Google’s services.
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