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This Week in Privacy

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In the last ten years Microsoft has invested heavily in user privacy. Just like security, privacy considerations are baked into every Microsoft product. It is almost a year since the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international community that develops open standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web, accepted and published Microsoft’s member submission for an Internet Standard to help protect consumer privacy. Last September I described how the W3C had announced the creation of a Tracking Protection Working Group that would bring together a broad set of stakeholders from across the industry to work on standards for “Do Not Track” technology and the group has been hard at work since then.

This week there are three important events related to online privacy:

These forums bring together opinion leaders and stakeholders from academia, industry, and government to discuss information technology, privacy, and data protection.

W3C’s Third Face-to-face Meeting of the Tracking Protection Working Group

The W3C Tracking Protection working group is chartered to produce three deliverables:

  • Tracking Preference Expression Definitions and Compliance
    When a large group of experts is brought together from across industry and government it is essential that they agree on terminology to prevent misunderstandings where people think they agree or disagree when in fact they don’t. The First Public Working Draft (FPWD) of this document was published in November and this week the group will discuss the changes made to the Editor’s Draft since then. The document highlights the large number of open issues that the group is working on.

  • Tracking Preference Expression (Do Not Track)
    The second document is a technical specification that defines the mechanisms to be used by browsers and other applications in order to signal user preferences not to be tracked online. Today, Internet Explorer 9 sends this “DNT” signal when you enable a Tracking Protection List. The FPWD of this document was also published in November and again the group will discuss the latest Editor’s Draft this week. Sending the DNT signal relies on Web sites to correctly recognize and obey the user’s request to not be tracked. At the present time, few Web sites take any action when they receive the signal.

  • Tracking Selection Lists
    The third deliverable for the Tracking Protection working group is a specification defining an interoperable format for Tracking Selection Lists. Tracking Selection Lists define rules that browsers can use to allow or block tracking elements on Web pages. A number of browsers today support this kind of list, either directly or via add-ins. In Internet Explorer, these lists are called Tracking Protection Lists (or TPLs). Internet Explorer 9 provides built-in support for TPLs specifically designed to help users control how they are tracked on the Web.

    A Web standard that defines the format of these lists will encourage a rich ecosystem of list providers that can work with any browser that chooses to support this feature. The working group hasn’t yet published a FPWD for Tracking Selection Lists but will discuss the Editor’s Draft written by participants from Microsoft and Opera in the meeting this morning.

Tracking Selection Lists are designed to complement the DNT signal, which will take some time to be effective. Inevitably, not all sites will respect the DNT user preference and Tracking Selection Lists will provide consumers an additional control to avoid being tracked by those sites. When a Tracking Selection List is enabled, the browser will avoid contacting the listed sites. You can read more about IE9’s Tracking Protection from previous blog posts.

Computers, Privacy and Data Protection Conference

I am looking forward to participating in the Tracking Protection Workshop at the CPDP Conference tomorrow afternoon. Simon Davies, a Research Fellow at LSE and Director of Privacy International, and Alexander Hanff, who heads up Privacy International’s Digital Privacy portfolio, host a panel exploring the dynamics of Tracking Protection Lists. This should be an engaging session and I’m keen to listen to the questions and comments from all involved.

What’s Next?

The W3C working group has an aggressive timetable to make progress in the coming months, to tease out the consensus from the different groups involved, and to move the specification documents through the W3C process. You can follow the progress through the group’s mailing list archive. I plan to provide further updates on IEBlog. The minutes from this week’s meeting will be published on the group’s home page.

—Adrian Bateman, Program Manager, Internet Explorer

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 23, 2012
    Does this mean that IE10 will actually support free and open HTML5 audio and video? - because currently that is all developers care about.  IE is falling behind again.

  • Anonymous
    January 23, 2012
    IE9 already supports HTML5 audio and video according to the official spec.

  • Anonymous
    January 23, 2012
    I think you'll find that theres a lot more to life than just "open" audio and video =p

  • Anonymous
    January 23, 2012
    All you foss advocates! IE will not support OGG, WebM and any other non-standardized "foss formats", so please stop your childish endless rant, you are just making yourself seem foolish.

  • Anonymous
    January 23, 2012
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 24, 2012
    @IEBlog I agree with Harry this is necessary to remove off topic comments

  • Anonymous
    January 24, 2012
    Thank you for expressing your desire that comments remain on-topic. We prefer that, too. However, efforts in the past to delete off-topic comments have only resulted in an increased number of those comments. We will maintain the current policy of only deleting spam, duplicates, and comments that contain profane, racist, or otherwise offensive language.

  • Anonymous
    January 24, 2012
    Give us the release date of IE10 beta for windows 7 PC's! Let IE shine once again!

  • Anonymous
    January 24, 2012
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 25, 2012
    IE should make headway and allow detection and user selected blocking of web content (1 pixel images, empty CSS files, javascript files that only server to load a tracking pixel, etc.,).  Preventing those requests at the HTTP level would help greatly especially in reduced bandwidth mobile and limited CPU platforms.  

  • Anonymous
    January 26, 2012
    @ralph blocking some of those things by default would be bad.  Many analytical tools use these pixels to log stats about site access and usage. You may not want to be tracked but the info collected helps developers determine how their sites and apps are used so they can improve them.

  • Anonymous
    January 28, 2012
    @josh Microsoft has made it clear they will support h.264, mp3 and AAC. That is clear enough. And everybody in the world has been using mp3 and h.264 support on their computers for many years now. It is not going to change unless a major improvement in video compression comes along.

  • Anonymous
    January 29, 2012
    @A_Zune Microsoft did state they would only natively support 1 (patent encumbered) video format and 2 (patent /& license encumbered) audio formats - that is correct.  What "we" (the Web Developer community at large) are asking is when Microsoft is going to support free and open formats... specifically ones that are not encumbered with patent issues and even more so are not subject to licensing issues (mp3 I'm looking at you!) that will cause us to have to pay licensing costs 50x what our ad revenue might be on our sites regardless if our HTML5 games are free or not. Microsoft has been approached by developers big and small regarding this and has been (especially on the audio front) extremely quiet in terms of making a statement that they intend to natively support a free and open format for both video and audio. I realize they felt this was buying them some time and that developers would start taking IE9/IE10 seriously as a platform - but until a statement is made that they intend to support a free and open format - developers are NOT interested in developing for IE, in fact because there has been silence many (including me) have already given up.  IE users visiting my sites are presented with links to download a better browser.  I'd let the users in and give them a sub-par experience but that helps no one. As soon as MSFT publicly makes a statement that they intend to support a free and open audio/video format for HTML5 (just like the rest of the free and open web) then I'll gladly wait and provide IE support the day Microsoft releases a capable version of their browser.  Unfortunately with IE10 well into development and not a single word from Dean Hachamovitch indicating that MSFT intends to create a future proof platform NO developers will be interested. In fact I was at a dev conference in Toronto a while back... MS had a booth there... no one cared... even with the offer of a free device for making win phone apps.  Any dev that approached asked the same questions....  will the browser support Ogg? will it support WebM?... will it support any free and open Audio or Video format?... (MSFT:no not currently) -> Developers:Sorry not interested - Goodbye! There was probably $1,000's spent on PR for that... and by having reps there tell the truth... they actually lost developers.

  • Anonymous
    January 30, 2012
    @Alan The only known video format that is guaranteed to be not patent  encumbered is MPEG I However it would cost 10 times to 100 times more to support that format thant to pay royalties for h.264. I hope noone ever decidecd to support that. In fact is is expensive to use any other format than h.264  because weaker compression cost a lot of money and also i very bad for the environment. Noone should even consider using inferior formats considering the environmental consequenses alone. I would strongly suggest Microsoft make a statement that they will not support any HTML5 video format that has weaker compression than h.264 as not to harm the environment.

  • Anonymous
    January 31, 2012
    The comment has been removed