Microsoft Hopes to Win Over Consumer Privacy Advocates

L. Taylor - August 9, 2000

Event Summary

By announcing a beta version of several privacy and cookie management features, Microsoft responded to recent news stories against online advertisers and other parties who obtain aggregate data through clickstream technologies. In Microsoft's new browser privacy model, before reporting through any cookie, Microsoft's browser will tell the user what type of cookie. It also can be customized to request further permission before proceeding with the website's cookie request. Figure 1, taken from Microsoft's press information, shows what a typical cookie warning would look like. What makes these features different from the cookie management features in previous versions of Microsoft's and Netscape's browsers is that they add some more information to the surfer when a cookie is reported, and allow a finer level of control for blocking cookies...