Google, Facebook bypasses IE privacy settings

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The question is not who are those companies trying to bypass Microsoft Internet Explorer’s privacy settings. The question that needs to be raised is which companies are not trying to bypass IE’s privacy settings.

As news broke that search engine giant Google was able to circumvent Apple’s Safari browser, Microsoft also revealed that the company bypassed privacy settings in IE as well. According to TechPolicy, Google isn’t the only one as Facebook is also doing the same as well as thousands of other companies out there.

IE blocks cookies from third party sources that doesn’t have a special code – the Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) allows websites to declare their intended use of information they get from the browser.

IE blocks cookies that are deemed unsatisfactory from a privacy perspective. Unfortunately for them, companies have been able to circumvent their defenses.

According to Facebook, they don’t have a P3P policy. In a Facebook Help Center entry they wrote:

Facebook’s Platform for privacy Preferences (P3P)

Thanks for your interest in privacy at Facebook. You are seeing this message because you attempted to access Facebook’s Platform for privacy Preferences (P3P) compact policy.

The organization that established P3P, the World Wide Web Consortium, suspended its work on this standard several years ago because most modern web browsers do not fully support P3P. As a result, the P3P standard is now out of date and does not reflect technologies that are currently in use on the web, so most website currently do not have P3P policies.

Image source: digitaltrends.com