In the wake of reports that Google had sidestepped privacy settings in Apple’s Safari browser, Microsoft announced today it had discovered that the Web giant had done the same with Internet Explorer.
whilen the IE staff heard that Google had bypassed user privateness settings on Safari, we asked ourselves a easy query: is Google circumventing the privacy personal tastes of internet Explorer customers too?” IE govt Dean Hachamovitch wrote in a blog submit this morning. “We’ve found out the answer is yes: Google is using identical easy methods to get across the default privateness protections in IE and observe IE customers with cookies.”
The blog post, which details Microsoft’s findings and offers privacy protection tips, said it has contacted Google about its concerns and asked it to “commit to honoring P3P privacy settings for users of all browsers.”
In the blog post, Hachamovitch explained how the bypass occurs:
Technically, Google utilizes a nuance within the P3 specification that has the effect of bypassing user preferences approximately cookies. The P3 specification (in an try to depart room for long run advances in privacy insurance policies) states that browsers must forget about any undefined policies they come upon. Google sends a P3 policy that fails to tell the browser about Google’s use of cookies and user information. Google’s P3 policy is in truth a commentary that it is not a P3 policy.
Google countered that Microsoft backs a system that is dated and impractical.
“It is well known–including by Microsoft–that it is impractical to comply with Microsoft’s request while providing modern Web functionality,” Rachel Whetstone, senior vice president of communications and policy for Google, said in a statement to CNET this evening. “We have been open about our approach, as have many other Web sites.”
“Today the Microsoft policy is widely non-operational,” she continued. “A 2010 research report indicated that over 11,000 Web sites were not issuing valid P3P policies as requested by Microsoft.”
P3, or Platform for privacy personal tastes, is an respectable advice of the around the world internet Consortium that websites use to summarize their privacy insurance policies. however, the advice has been largely disregarded due to the fact its advent a decade in the past, with many best web websites such as Google.com, Apple.com, CNN.com, and Twitter.com opting not to use it to describe their policies.
Hachamovitch also took the opportunity to point out that IE users have access to a Tracking Protection List intended to prevent the P3P bypass. Additionally, he said Microsoft is “investigating what additional changes to make to our products. The P3P specification says that browsers should ignore unknown tokens. Privacy advocates involved in the original specification have recently suggested that IE ignore the specification and block cookies with unrecognized tokens.”
Microsoft slammed Google in advance this week after The Wall street magazine said that Google had sidestepped Safari person privateness settings to trace web customers. the hunt giant and different advert companies saidly used unique code to get round Safari’s privateness controls to be able to track customers on computer systems and cell gadgets.