Today I’ve read an article on practicalecommerce.com regarding Internet Explorer 9 and its included tracking protection. The all idea behind this project is to block 3rd party tracking scripts from taking place when you use that feature. So Internet Explorer 9 visitors can use this feature to prevent Google Analytics or any other 3rd party tracking script to track what we are doing on the website. The official announcement of the “tracking protection” mechanism was posted in Microsoft’s MSDN blog.
It seems that online privacy measures start to take place. After the Federal trade commission released its report about consumer privacy online, it seems that many companies has started to take this subject more seriously (you can read the report here – PDF). The report is called “Protecting Consumer Privacy in an Era of Rapid Change”. The report was published on December 1, 2010.
In the next video you can see a presentation on this new feature in IE9:
As you can see in the video, when you visit a specific page with 3rd party tracking functionality, IE9 will popup a dialogue window, allowing you to add the website to your blocking list (“Add to tracking protection list”). When you load the page, the areas where there is a 3rd party script that tracks the data, those scripts will be blocked by IE9. You can further specify what you want to reveal and what you don’t want to reveal. IE9 updates the and checked the list once a week according to Microsoft, to see if any changes were made.
The basic idea of this new IE9 feature is to block Third-party tracking. Third-party tracking means that the owner of a website, puts a third-party script that transmit information about visitor’s online behavior and demographic data directly to the third-party domain. The new 3rd party block mechanism in IE9 will help visitors identify those third-party scripts when they visit Internet pages.
Even so, I can totally agree with practicalecommerce.com regarding the content personalization feature that is basing its content personalization actions on those specific third-party integration scripts. If the information is blocked and not passed to the third-party server to generate personalized content, the user will not see relevant content that was previously designed to be delivered to him by the content personalization and behavioral targeting system.
I personally don’t know how many people will use this feature, after all, what’s wrong about getting personalized content? – Why should I b that concerned when a tracking code like Google analytics tracks my foot steps on a specific website?
There are people that might jump right on the wagon and use this feature, while other will continue there already busy lifestyle and forget that it’s even exists.
If you have an opinion about this subject, please share it by commenting below, thanks.
You must log in to post a comment.