All Tom's Guide news of August 2, 2010
04.08.10
Did Microsoft choose company profit over consumer privacy? That's what a recent article from the Wall Street Journal indicates, reporting that Internet Explorer 8 could have been more secure on the privacy front had Microsoft advertising executives not stepped in and thwarted the plans.
According to the report, the Internet Explorer 8 team wanted the browser to offer users a simple way to avoid being tracked online by automatically blocking tracking tools. These tools were determined based on the number of times 3rd-party content appeared online--items appearing on ten or more visited sites constituted as a tracking tool, and would be blocked. The only way to make the browser less private was to manually change the settings in the Internet Options menu.
The problem with this concept was that--by giving automatic privacy to customers--Microsoft would have a hard time making a profit from selling online ads. Keeping mouse clicks private would prevent advertisers from viewing user habits and thus make it difficult to advertise the correct product or service. The proposal by the development team sparked an in-house heated debate between the ad execs and the browser group. Eventually, the browser group lost.
Source: Tom's Guide