Chris Soghoian writes, in part:
A few years ago, advertising executives within Microsoft puled rank and forced the IE team to sabotage an otherwise pretty cool anti-tracking feature in IE8. After the company was rightfully savaged by the Wall Street Journal earlier this summer when it exposed the tale, Microsoft has now decided to offer a far more effective anti-tracking tool in IE9.
As I explained at length in a blog post last month, Microsoft has decided to try to compete on privacy, likely because it is an area which one of its main competitors (Google) is rather weak. During his interview at CES, Hachamovitch himself was quite happy to take potshots at Google, and the fact that the firm’s advertising business is dependent upon facilitating, not stopping tracking of users.
Read more on slight paranoia. One section of Chris’s commentary is subtitled, “How Microsoft sacrifices user privacy in order to assist the government,” and you will want to be sure to read that.