Hachamovitch: Microsoft Is in a Unique Position to Address Privacy with IE9

Microsoft is a privileged company when it comes down to being able to offer users of its browser the tools necessary to protect their information while online, believes Dean Hachamovitch, Corporate Vice President of Internet Explorer.

The upcoming Release Candidate (RC) of Internet Explorer 9 will introduce a new feature dubbed Tracking Protection.

As you can infer from the official label, Tracking Protection allows customers running IE9 RC to control which websites can track their online activities and which cannot.

For this they will need a Tracking Protection List which will contain the sites for which IE9 will block tracking and even advertisements.

Last week, Hachamovitch discussed browser privacy, and specifically the evolution of online privacy with Walt Mossberg as part of the D: All Things Digital at CES.

“I think advertising is great. But be careful about connecting advertising with tracking. We have advertising customers, and we want them to be delighted. And we have Windows customers, and we want them to be delighted.

“We have a unique position on this that gives us an opportunity to lead,” the Corporate VP of IE said.

While it’s introducing Tracking Protection in IE9, Microsoft will take no additional active measures to enable the feature for all users or to provide them with lists of blocked websites.

The Redmond company is going to leave this to the community and to the users themselves. In this regard, Tracking Protection is an opt-in blacklist mechanism designed to let customers concerned about which websites are tracking their info to block the third-parties they’re not comfortable with having their data.

As I’ve mentioned above, Tracking Protection will debut in IE9 RC. According to Microsoft, users will only have to exercise their patience only a tad longer, as the Release Candidate development milestone of Internet Explorer 9 is quite close.

Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Beta is available for download here.

Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Platform Preview 7 (PP7) is available for download here.