With recent concerns of site “history sniffing,” as it’s being called, the Federal Trade Commission has proposed a Do-Not-Track list in order to protect users’ information. With all that’s going on right now as far as privacy rights, Microsoft announced that, with the release of its Internet Explorer 9, a new tracking protection setting will be added to the features so that recent sites that have been tracking users’ browsing histories can no longer obtain such information.
With the imminent release of IE9, this new feature will give users the option of whether or not to share information with sites that are not known or trusted. This feature includes a tracking protection list of all websites that the browser will block from your information upon entering a specified URL into the address bar. Until the Federal Trade Commission decides whether or not to pass a law barring sites from being able to acquire this sort of information, the best way for a user to protect themselves is to add those sites to the tracking protection list. The concept of the list is best thought of as similar to the “Do Not Call” list for telephones, but instead for web browsers.
For the tracking protection list, Microsoft makes it easy for you to add different websites. They won’t add any in for you automatically, so if you want protection from a site you’ll need to add it, yourself. This list is the best way to provide users with a way to control the data being collected about them on sites they don’t visit directly. This feature doesn’t determine how the information being taken will be used, but it provides users a way to opt out of the release of their information in the first place.
Just as there is a tracking protection list, there is also a so-called “white-list,” meaning that these websites are trusted and are allowed to access users’ browser data. This feature grants the user ultimate control of their privacy and the information they wish to share, as it gives him/her the ability to trust or not trust websites simply by adding them to the lists.
This new feature added for the upcoming release of Internet Explorer 9 could be a smart business tactic for Microsoft in their hopes to gain back some of the market-share that Internet Explorer 6 has lost them. With IE9 beta version getting positive feedback on all of its new features, could the “No -Track” feature be the icing on the cake for Internet Explorer to return to the top in the browser war?