Microsoft attacks Google over privacy, ignores the exact same violations from its partner, Facebook
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Microsoft is leveraging an outcry over Google’s approach to privacy to smear its rival in the press. It released a blog post yesterday thatclaimed to have fresh findings about how Google circumvents privacy protections in World wide web Explorer to spot cookies that track users across the internet.
But Microsoft was playing dumb. It has known about this strategy for two years, and failed to mention that numerous other main sites like Facebook, in which Microsoft is an investor, use the very same methods to get around IE’s default privacy settings.
Here is the setup from Microsoft’s blog post yesterday, written by Dean Hachamovitch a corporate Vice President at World wide web Explorer. “When the IE team heard that Google had bypassed user privacy settings on Safari, we asked ourselves a straightforward question: is Google circumventing the privacy preferences of Net Explorer users too?”
That’s a question that Microsoft currently knows the answer to. A study published way back in 2010 showed that far more than a third of web sites visited making use of Internet Explorer have a technical error that enables cookies to be installed. The study was huge news, meriting a story in the New York Times.
The trick that Google, Facebook and several other are utilizing to get about IE’s privacy settings involves a net normal know as P3P. In their current blog post, Microsoft stated they would be calling on Google to honor this protocol. But Facebook has produced it perfectly clear that P3P isn’t some universally accepted technologies. A blog post from technologist Nik Cubrilovic lays out the specifics. Attached to the piece of code that makes it possible for Facebook to get by IE’s privacy settings he located this statement:
“The organization that established P3P, the World Wide Internet Consortium, suspended its work on this regular numerous years ago simply because most contemporary internet browsers do not fully help P3P. As a result, the P3P regular is now out of date and does not reflect technologies that are at present in use on the net, so most internet sites presently do not have P3P policies.”
So to recap. Microsoft jumped on a story about how Google was obtaining about privacy protections in Safari to drum up outrage about a two year old violation they were already well conscious of. What they neglected to mention is that a lot of other web sites, including Facebook, in which Microsoft is a key investor, and partners with Bing more than data in search, utilizes the precise same tactics and have more or much less dismissed the standards Microsoft is calling on Google to honor.
This is playing politics with privacy issues, plain and straightforward.
Filed under: security 
