14 DAY TRIAL // It’s a well-known fact that Microsoft, or the “new” Microsoft as Steve Ballmer names it, cares about its users more than ever before, but it seems like this new approach isn’t quite pleasing rival companies.
Yahoo! for example said in a blog post that it doesn’t agree with Microsoft’s factory-enabled “Do Not Track” feature available in Internet Explorer 10 and claimed that all its websites would ignore it completely.
The “Do Not Track” option comes enabled by default in Internet Explorer 10, the browser currently available on Windows 8 platforms, and blocks websites from collecting user data for advertising purposes.
“In principle, we support “Do Not Track” (DNT). Unfortunately, because discussions have not yet resulted in a final standard for how to implement DNT, the current DNT signal can easily be abused,” Yahoo! said in a blog post.
“Recently, Microsoft unilaterally decided to turn on DNT in Internet Explorer 10 by default, rather than at users’ direction. In our view, this degrades the experience for the majority of users and makes it hard to deliver on our value proposition to them. It basically means that the DNT signal from IE10 doesn’t express user intent.”
While this could very well affect the overall number of visitors for all Yahoo websites, Microsoft doesn’t really seem to care.
Earlier this month, the Redmond-based technology company was heavily criticized by top advertisers around the world for delivering the “Do Not Track” option enabled by default.
Ford Motor Company, Intel, IBM, Dell, AT&T, McDonalds and Nestle have all requested Microsoft to disable the option, but “it’s users’ privacy that’s more important in the end,” the software giant said.