Well I’m certainly surprised!
In an unexpected shift, Microsoft has said that Internet Explorer 9 will support Do Not Track. The consumer privacy feature, developed by Mozilla, transmits a header to any Web site that a user visits, indicating whether the user agrees to have their movements tracked online.
But Dean Hachamovitch, corporate vice president for Internet Explorer, said that Do Not Track alone will not sufficiently protect consumers. Accordingly, Microsoft will still include its own feature, Tracking Protection Lists, to forcibly block tracking by unapproved sites.
“Tracking Protection is the primary technical method in IE9 to help protect users from tracking,” he said in a blog post. “The final release of IE9 will also implement the broadly discussed Do Not Track User Preference (via both a DOM property and an HTTP header, as described in the W3C submission) as a secondary method.”
Google, meanwhile, has advanced yet another approach: a “Keep My Opt-Outs” extension for Chrome that would alert any companies that are members of the National Advertising Initiative to not track that user.
