S more people adopt the latest version of Microsoft's market-dominant Internet Explorer Web browser, its privacy features are creating unintended consequences for users, information publishers and advertisers.
Users of the software get more privacy protection than they once did. But on many Web sites they are also getting more pop-up ads and less personalized service than in the past, according to industry executives and analysts.
Some Internet marketers, meanwhile, say they are having increased difficulty managing advertising campaigns, as the Internet Explorer version 6.0 solidifies its position as the most widely-used browser. And some publishers say their privacy efforts have actually been undermined by Microsoft.
"Microsoft has created this artificial misrepresentation of a lot of sites out there, and they've made it a really difficult, unpleasant experience for the user, and for us," said Vanessa Benfield, senior vice president of sales for iVillage, an online women's network.
All of these complaints involve an Explorer feature that is intended to reduce the number of so-called third-party cookies.
A cookie is a text file placed by a Web site on a user's computer, so the site can recognize that computer on future visits. A third-party cookie is one that is placed by an Internet company that has a relationship with the site a user visits — for instance, an Internet advertising company that delivers the ads that appear on a site, or a company that feeds weather reports or stock quotes to users of a news site.
Third-party cookies have a bad name in privacy circles because users who visit a particular Web site are frequently not aware they are being tracked by other companies that do business with that site. The other companies may have vastly different privacy policies than the site the user is visiting.
Internet Explorer 6.0, which was released late last year and has gradually become the most widely used browser software, aims to discourage third-party tracking abuses. It does so by blocking such cookies unless the third party's privacy policy meets strict standards, like agreeing not to collect personally-identifiable information on the user it is tracking. These third parties must put that policy into a machine-readable format specified by the World Wide Web Consortium's Platform for Privacy Preferences, otherwise known as P3P.
The problem for the Web sites is that so far only 25 of the 100 most highly visited Web sites have put their own privacy policies into that format. And even fewer have worked with their business partners to ensure that they, too, have digitized privacy policies and that they conform with Explorer's rules. As a result, even when a Web publisher does business with a partner with a strict privacy policy, if the partner has not yet digitized that policy to comply with P3P and Explorer, the partner cannot place cookies on a user's computer.
And if that business partner serves pop-up ads and relies on cookies to limit the number of ads a person sees, or track the number of ads delivered to a subset of customers, it cannot do so successfully. Likewise, if the business partner relies on cookies to recognize a user and deliver personalized content like sports scores or horoscopes, it cannot.
Further complicating matters is the fact that publishers and marketers have no way of knowing that third-party cookies have been blocked from a user's computer. As a result, those companies could simply lose users who become alienated by too many pop-up ads, or whose personalized information is no longer being delivered.
According to Michael Zimbalist, executive director of the Online Publishers Association, publishers have only in recent weeks begun to recognize this issue, as more users migrate to Explorer 6.0 software. "Suddenly, everybody's realizing that this is upon us," Mr. Zimbalist said.
So far, the true extent of the problem may be limited. Mr. Zimbalist and other online publishing executives said that most sites did not deliver material or advertisements to users via third-party companies. And he said the third party that did deliver most advertisements on behalf of publishers, DoubleClick, complies with P3P. "That said, the infrastructure for Web publishing is very complex now, with multiple content feeds and different ad servers," Mr. Zimbalist said. "And the more complex a publisher's infrastructure is, the more of an issue this will be."
Indeed, Internet Explorer treats some publishers as if they are third parties, even when they are not. Take iVillage, which has not yet put its privacy policy into a form that is compliant with either P3P or Internet Explorer 6.0.
