Joel Hruska writes:
Microsoft has affirmed its commitment to shipping IE10 and Windows 8 with “Do Not Track” (DNT) enabled by default. In doing so, it’s set the stage for a major war over user privacy, and appointed itself an unofficial white knight of user privacy.
Feel free to pause a moment and let the cognitive dissonance fade.
Read more on ITProPortal.
It’s refreshing to see a major company risk the “wrath” of advertisers in order to do what it knows its customers want. The folks who pay Microsoft for Windows software don’t want to be followed around the net by groups of strangers who have agreed to quietly record and share every site they visit, every interest they display, and all information they willingly give to any one of the sites. In other words, Microsoft’s customers don’t want to be tracked.
Microsoft knows this. Google and the other advertisers know this also, but they won’t admit it because their customers – the ones who pay them – are the ones who want to want to do the tracking. So the advertisers want to pretend that being tracked is so important to site visitors that visitors should have to give explicit consent NOT to be tracked. They want to follow the old “Notice and Choice” standard while hoping that nobody actually notices and chooses.
Sadly, Wired has decided try to convince IE10 users to give up their privacy by denying full access to those who haven’t consented to their online
surveillance and minimizing its privacy implications by calling it “data collection”.
Thanks, Microsoft, for at least bringing the trackers out in the open even if they do try to hide behind business plans and euphemisms.