Microsoft Hinders Privacy Settings for IE, Making Advertisers Happy

Microsoft engineers originally planned to limit the power of third-party cookies in Internet Explorer 8. However, executive concerned with the result of online advertisement won the battle. Now, the world’s leading browser was designed to share every private information of the user to the advertisers. That’s indeed a 180 degree turn from the initial concept. According to the company, users can change their settings to browse privately. But most users do not know that such privacy setting exists, and that it’s turned off by deafult. They can choose whether to accept third-party cookies, but it’s not a permanent fix. This setting must be deliberately switched on by the user every time they start up the software. Now, all browsers including IE8, allows you to turn off cookies.

Internet Explorer, whom once had 95 percent of the browser market share, lost ground to competitors like Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. With 60 percent remaining, the engineers are hoping that they can make up with the losses by offering powerful privacy settings. Brian McAndrews, senior vice president at Microsoft, is bothered that the plans would decrease the effectiveness of online marketing by controlling the data that can be collected from consumers. But according to Microsoft, there’s no such thing as “perfect privacy.”

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