Monday, August 2, 2010

Microsoft Turns Off Privacy Features to Win Advertiser Revenue

After sharp internal debate, Microsoft designed Internet Explorer so that users must keep turning on privacy settings every time IE starts.

Microsoft chose "advertisers" over "privacy".

Product development people originally
designed IE to have superior set of privacy tools. The benefit - keep your web browsing private and prevent tagging by "3rd party cookies" and "trackers".

However, wanting to profile buyer behavior, the Microsoft biz side won out, changing the browser to open the door to taggers for advertising.

Details here:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703467304575383530439838568.html?mod=djemTECH_t