Internet Explorer Team: Google Bypassing User Privacy Settings

The latest problems for Google continue when the Internet Explorer team decided to see if Google was also getting around Internet Explorer privacy preferences.

“When the IE team heard that Google had bypassed user privacy settings on Safari, we asked ourselves a simple question: is Google circumventing the privacy preferences of Internet Explorer users too? We’ve discovered the answer is yes: Google is employing similar methods to get around the default privacy protections in IE and track IE users with cookies. Below we spell out in more detail what we’ve discovered, as well as recommendations to IE users on how to protect their privacy from Google with the use of IE9's Tracking Protection feature. We’ve also contacted Google and asked them to commit to honoring P3P privacy settings for users of all browsers.

We’ve found that Google bypasses the P3P Privacy Protection feature in IE. The result is similar to the recent reports of Google’s circumvention of privacy protections in Apple’s Safari Web browser, even though the actual bypass mechanism Google uses is different.

Internet Explorer 9 has an additional privacy feature called Tracking Protection which is not susceptible to this type of bypass. Microsoft recommends that customers who want to protect themselves from Google’s bypass of P3P Privacy Protection use Internet Explorer 9. Customers can find additional lists and information on this page.”

As you might have heard, this all began with the Wall Street Journal article describing how Google bypassed Apple security settings in its Safari web browser. The difference here is that Safari is about 12% of web users while Internet Explorer is closer to 50% market share meaning this affects half the people reading this article.