Online Tracking, Consumer Protection, and Web Standards

Today, the W3C announced the creation of a Tracking Protection Working Group to work on defining what tracking is, signaling user intent, and tracking protection lists. The W3C’s action here can help protect consumers from unwanted tracking. We welcome the opportunity to work with the industry and governments on a Web standard based on our earlier work.

The Tracking Protection feature in IE9 provides a way for consumers to benefit today by restricting which sites on the Web get information from them.

The W3C accepted and published Microsoft’s member submission for an Internet standard to help protect consumer privacy last February. IE9 supports the “Do-Not-Track” header/DOM property and Tracking Protection Lists outlined in that W3C submission. The W3C noted that the submission was “…both timely and well-aligned with the consortium's objectives and priorities” and announced a workshop at Princeton University to continue standardisation work for Web privacy and tracking protection. Microsoft presented two papers at the workshop in April.* The workshop report summarises the two days of passionate discussions with nearly a hundred participants from academia, government, advertising companies, browser vendors and major Web sites.

In the months since the workshop, the W3C has continued to discuss the best way to structure this work with the various stakeholders. As Dean noted last December, defining what the Do-Not-Track signal means and what to do with it is an important part of completing this work. We are looking forward to working with the Web community on this important initiative at the W3C.

—Adrian Bateman, Program Manager, Internet Explorer


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Improving Consumer Privacy on the Internet with the W3C and Web Standards

Today, the W3C formally created a working group to focus on consumer privacy on the Internet.

Internet Explorer 9 was built with a focus on consumer privacy. As Dean Hachamovitch explained in the blog introducing Tracking Protection a comprehensive approach requires both a) The ability for Web sites to detect consumers intent not to be tracked and b) A mechanism for consumers to protect themselves when their intent is not respected. Since the announcement, numerous privacy organizations have begun offering Tracking Protection Lists.

We saw the opportunity to work together with the W3C and its members to create a common standard, improve site adoption and increase consumer privacy on the Internet. In late February, the W3C accepted and published Microsoft’s member submission for an industry standard. Today, with the formation of the new privacy working group, the W3C takes the next step in establishing a standard for web sites to detect when consumers express their intent not to be tracked and help protect those same consumers from sites that do not respect that intent. The full charter and details of the working group are available here.

We look forward to working with the members of the W3C on this important initiative.


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