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When users go to iVillage and click on the "My Horoscope" tab, they are taken to Astrology.com. But at that point, the Internet Explorer sees Astrology.com as the primary site. IVillage becomes the third party, and cannot track its users with cookies, even though users are still within the iVillage network. There is a further twist: iVillage owns Astrology.com.
And because Explorer will warn users that cookies are being blocked, Ms. Benfield says it sends a signal to users that the site's privacy policies are substandard. "The privacy settings for Explorer, while strict, actually aren't as protective as the policy on a lot of sites, including iVillage," Ms. Benfield said. "The problem comes when you try to turn that policy into a code," referring to the code that translates a written privacy policy into a P3P format that Explorer can recognize.
Richard Purcell, Microsoft's corporate privacy officer, said the company based Explorer's cookie screening settings on a standard reached by the Network Advertising Initiative, an online advertising trade group, and the Federal Trade Commission. Microsoft also sought the input of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which represents online publishers and advertisers, among others.
"And there was a lot of opportunity for other large publishers and commercial entities to come in here and view the ideas and plans and give their feedback during the I.E. 6 ramp-up," Mr. Purcell said.
"We sure wish technology had divine knowledge sometimes," he said. "But unfortunately, or fortunately, this technology can't divine the background legal implications for when a domain that's collecting information is different from the domain the person is visiting. That's just not available to the tool."
Privacy advocates say they sympathize with Internet publishers whose complex technology set-ups have made it difficult to comply with Explorer's standards. But they also say such pain will encourage publishers to get more serious about putting their privacy policies into a machine-readable P3P format. That will not only mollify Microsoft, they said, but it will also enable other P3P-reliant technologies — like AT&T's "privacy bird" software, which puts a color-coded bird onto a user's computer desktop, indicating how privacy-friendly sites are — to function.
In the short term, the issue could benefit companies like Tacoda, which helps coordinate the technology systems of large publishers, according to Tacoda's chief executive, Dave Morgan. But Mr. Morgan said publishers might also migrate toward Microsoft's Passport technology, which helps Web sites identify users as they enter the site — thereby reducing a site's need to rely on cookies to identify users.
Meanwhile, publishers who face problems complying with Explorer's standards worry that they will put an enormous amount of work into changing their systems, only to find that Microsoft has decided to change its standards with the next browser release in a manner that could take them back to the drawing board.
Mr. Purcell said publishers would be consulted in any future software releases just as they had been in the previous one. But publishers are not necessarily comforted by such assurances.
"Our legal department has been working on this for months," said Carl Fischer, a spokesman for iVillage. "And Microsoft can just change its standards down the line. They're imposing a one-size-fits-all rule for hundreds of different privacy policies. Why should that be up to Microsoft?"
