Google was captured lastly hebdomad bypassing default privacy settings in the Safari browser in order to serve up tracking cookies. The companionship claimed the situation was an accident and confined entirely to the Safari Web browser, simply today Microsoft claimed Google is doing much the same thing with Internet Explorer.

In a blog billet titled “Google bypassing user privacy settings” Microsoft’s IE Corporate Vice Chairman Dean Hachamovitch states that “When the IE squad seen that Google had bypassed user privacy settings on Safari, we necessitated ourselves a simple question: is Google circumventing the privacy preferences of Internet Explorer users too? We’ve discovered the answer is yes: Google is using alike methods to stimulate around the default privacy protections in IE and cross IE users with cookies.”

Hachamovitch explains that IE’s default configuration blocks third-party cookies unless presented with a “P3P (Platform for Privacy Preferences Project) Compact Policy Statement” indicating that the site will not employment the cookie to cross the user. Microsoft accuses Google of sending a drawstring of text that tricks the browser into thinking the cookie won’t be utilized for tracking. “By sending this text, Google bypasses the cookie protection and enables its third-party cookies to be allowed rather than blocked,” Microsoft said.

The text allegedly sent by Google really reads “This is not a P3P policy” and includes a link to a Google page which says cookies utilised to secure and authenticate Google users are taken to shop user preferences, and that the P3P protocol “was not designed with situations similar these in mind.”

Microsoft articulated it has contacted Google to ask the fellowship to “commit to honoring P3P privacy settings for users of altogether browsers.” Microsoft besides updated the Tracking Protection Lists in IE9 to keep the tracking described by Hachamovitch in the blog post. Ars has contacted Google to see if the society has any response to the Microsoft allegations, and we’ll update this situation if we see back.

UPDATE: It turns out Facebook and many other sites are using an almost very scheme to override Internet Explorer’s privacy setting, allotting to privacy researcher Lorrie Faith Cranor at Carnegie Mellon University. “Companies receive exposed that they may lie in their [P3P policies] and cypher bothers to do anything virtually it,” Cranor pent in a late blog post.

UPDATE 2: Google has gotten back to us with a lengthy reply, arguing that Microsoft’s reliance on P3P forces outdated practices onto modernistic websites, and items to a analyze conducted in 2010 (the Carnegie Mellon inquiry from Cranor and her colleagues) that canvassed 33,000 sites and found about a 3rd of them were circumventing P3P in Internet Explorer.

“Microsoft uses a ‘self-declaration’ protocol (known as ‘P3P’) dating from 2002 under which Microsoft asks websites to represent their privacy practices in machine-readable form,” Google Senior VP of Communications and Policy Rachel Whetstone says in a statement e-mailed to Ars. “It is substantially known including by Microsoft that it is impractical to comply with Microsoft’s request while providing mod web functionality.”

Facebook’s “Like” button, the ability to sign into websites using your Google account “and hundreds more modernistic Web services” would exist broken by Microsoft’s P3P policy, Google says. “It is well known that it is impractical to comply with Microsoft’s request while providing this web functionality,” Whetstone said. “Today the Microsoft policy is widely non-operational.”

That 2010 research eve calls away Microsoft’s ain msn.com and live.com for providing invalid P3P policy statements. The inquiry newspaper further states that “Microsoft’s endure website recommends the usage of invalid CPs as a work-around for a problem in IE.”