RSSIE6 Privacy Features Cause Advertising Headache
By Craig Newell | Published June 1, 2001, 2:36 AM
Online privacy advocates will be ecstatic when they take a look at the first implementation of P3P, the Platform for Privacy Preferences, in Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6. P3P technology will allow users to set their privacy preferences in the browser and then let the browser take care of managing whether sites with questionable policies have access to set cookies and the like. But the new restrictions may prove to be more trouble than expected, as P3P can block third-party cookies and result in broken ad banners.
P3P is a new industry standard that enables companies to express their privacy practices in specially formatted tags embedded in their Web sites. P3P is officially an initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an industry group that approves standards like HTML. Ideally, sites will encode their privacy policies in P3P and the browser will alert the user to practices that conflict from what the user has specified.
BetaNews spoke with Microsoft Product Unit Manager Michael Wallent about the P3P features in Internet Explorer 6. Wallent told BetaNews, "We use P3P as a tool for consumers to make better use of cookies on the Web." He added, "[P3P] gives users more control on the Web."
To help small businesses quickly comply with P3P standards, Microsoft has created a Privacy Wizard. Web administrators can fill out questions relating to the privacy practices of their site, and Microsoft will generate a P3P compliant XML file to be placed on their Web site allowing browsers to automatically understand the policy.
Many larger Web sites have more elaborate policies that must be reformatted for P3P. Some companies may even be forced to change privacy practices to ensure their content displays in Internet Explorer.
In the case of Internet giant AOL, internal documents examined by BetaNews revealed that the company is facing a serious problem making their banner ads display and click-through on Internet Explorer 6.0. One document discusses this problem, noting "Recent testing with the bundled IE6 browser has revealed problems with regard to the P3P technology and AOL content and ad banners. By default, IE6 will be blocking third party cookies. Because these do not have a P3P compliant policy header, the browser blocks and causes error pages, or 'web page cannot be found messages.'"
Microsoft's Wallent noted previous issues with LinkExchange banners, and acknowledged problems with ads may occur, "in the way they do the redirect." He continued, "if the target [URL] is not set in the link and [it is] in the cookie, it is possible."
Documents reveal that AOL has been reluctant to develop a P3P compliant privacy policy, because it forces the company to clarify previously ambiguous or nonexistent aspects of current practices. One AOL Time Warner employee working on the problem writes, "Having to create P3P compliant policy(ies) will force us to have to itemize activities that are not presently discussed in our privacy policy, e.g., cookie use. This could lead to comparisons with our AOL Privacy Policy which omits much of the detail we would be forced to answer to in a P3P compliant policy."
Microsoft's Wallent agreed that in many cases, "the issue is not putting up the XML tags, it is defining the legal privacy policy."
It is unclear whether AOL will be able to remedy the situation before Internet Explorer 6 is released this fall. As a result, the timeline for adoption of the new browser could play an important role in whether or not AOL will be able to correct any problems before many users upgrade to IE6.
Geoff Johnston, vice president of product marketing for WebSideStory's StatMarket, a service which monitors Internet user trends, told BetaNews "Generally the usage share of new browsers, at least in Microsoft's case, tend to take off very quickly, while their predecessor begins to dip almost immediately."
StatMarket data indicates that Internet Explorer 5.0 gained a 20% market share in only three months.
AOL Time Warner spokesperson Tricia Primrose told BetaNews the company does not disclose its Internet advertising revenue, but "approximately 24% of AOL Time Warner's revenue comes from advertising." This figure includes all advertising, including, for example, television ads on CNN, thus any impact on revenue may be negligible.
Given all of the pressure on P3P to provide users with more control over their personal information, it remains to be seen whether it will be a success with consumers. Some technologies added to Internet Explorer in previous versions, such as the PICS ratings tags, have received a lukewarm reception. If consumers become irritated and set their browser to the lowest privacy setting, it could spell a quick demise for P3P as a standard.
AOL did not return repeated requests for comment on problems associated with AOL ad banners in Internet Explorer 6.
Nate Mook contributed to this report.
Hey it's this type of privacy / security that prevents certain companies to track what you are doing on the internet. So all that software designed to do that is pretty much useless. Microsoft likes this. Why? Think about it... it will be easy to sell protection. Kinda like the Mafia. Hey I work for MS, I think P3P is a step in the right direction. I mean I talk to they guy that help write the standard with W3C. Things aren't airtight, but there will be privacy gained back to the user.
Hey also whats wrong with making the industry do a little work. This means they will probably have better control of what is on the web, instead of Joe Developer screwing things up.
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|A lot of people have claimed that advertising is necessary for a site to survive. The problem is that most of the dot-coms that have failed believed the same thing. Their entire business model was based on selling ad space and typically their content sucked.
A non-porn subscriber based website can survive. The trick is to provide content that people are willing to pay for. Around 26 million out of the approximately 100 million homes in the US pay for HBO. Why pay for HBO when you can get TV for free? Because of the Sopranos, Sex and the City, top movies, and Real Sex. People get something from HBO that they feel is worth paying for.
I also like to note that, as far as I can tell, since Betanews has broken free of EFront they have been banner free and their content has been better.
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|Okay, lets say that the IE6 thing works and you can block sites that don't conform to your privacy profile. You then take your guard down and surf freely thinking that everything is great. But, what you failed to realize is that http://i-will-spam-you.com WILL sell your email address to every spam list on Earth, even though their privacy statement and P3P says they won't. What prevents them from doing this? Criminals and scum lie, that's why they're criminals and scum.
This reminds me of gun control. If we banned guns in the US, 99.9% of the guns turned in would be from people that would have never used them in a crime. Criminals, on the other hand, wouldn't turn in their guns (they're criminals remember, so they don't follow the law). So, it wouldn't solve what it was intended to do. Matter of fact, it would be worse because criminals would know that the corner store owner didn't have a gun so there's nothing they could do to stop from being robbed. Just look at Australia and how their gun ban has caused their victimized rate to soar (they're #1 in the world among industrialized nations). Or look at the UK where not even the police have guns yet their victimized rate ranks #2 in the world. #3 is Holland, #4 is Sweden, #5 is Canada, the US isn't even in the top 10, and one of the lowest victimization rates in the world is in Northern Ireland, home of the Irish Republican Army. Source: http://www.wnd.com/news/...le.asp?ARTICLE_ID=21902
[/gun_control_rant]
My point is that P3P won't make things better and it isn't a "first step" as the gun control people like to say. It's actually a step backwards for privacy and could lead to ad serving problems which could cause the internet to not be able to fund itself. I'm waiting for Microsoft to release a version which blocks all pop-ups and banners by default. I will just LOVE paying $5/month to all the sites I visit. And I know who to blame when this happens, not Microsoft but the paranoid.
Tim
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|The internet is filled with paranoid whackos. Most sites use cookies for totally harmless uses. Most sites use IP and visitors stats for totally harmless uses. Using a cookie so you don't get the same ad twice or don't get a pop-up on every page is bad? Recording your IP address is bad (even though it's anonymous)? Seriously, cookies and anonymous IP tracking make your browsing experience BETTER. Many people that complain about the number of pop-up ads or the quality of banner ads probably also block cookies and that's the reason they are getting so many pop-ups and untargeted banner ads.
And what about sites that do THE EXACT SAME THING as storing IP addresses and cookies by using a session variable in the URL? They are doing the same thing but I see no one complaining about it. Probably because there hasn't been a story about "Evil Session Variables" in Newsweek like there has been about "Evil Cookies".
I would venture to bet that 99.9% of all internet sites use cookies and anonymous logs for legit reasons. If you visit http://www.i-will-try-to-hack-you.com you have yourself to blame for the misuse of your information. Can anyone even name a site that uses cookies, IP addresses, or logs for non-legit reasons? Do you people also see black helicopters and Jesus in trees?
Sure, many sites have sold their email addresses. But where did they get your e-mail address from? YOU entered your e-mail address on http://i-will-sell-your-email-addy.com so you only have yourself to blame. I think that spam is a far worse problem and does start to invade privacy or at least be annoying. I think sites that distribute email addresses are scum. However, those that do will just lie in their privacy policy anyway.
Sure, privacy is good. But, is being spammed an invasion of privacy? I don't hear people saying that normal junk mail or phone solicitors are an invasion of privacy. Most cookies and IPs that are stored are done so anonymously, with no personal information attached to them, so where is the invasion of privacy? However, normal junk mail companies have your home address and name, and phone solicitors have your home phone number and name also. Now THAT's an invasion of privacy.
Before we go off hell-bent on destroying the internet while trumpeting privacy, we should identify if our privacy is even being invaded. I don't see it, but then again, I also don't think the Government killed JFK.
Tim
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|Live in your little fantasy world if you want. We're not talking about harmless use of cookies. We're talking about companies being honest about what they do with collected information and the surreptitious association of anonymous usage statistics with private personal information. If you don't think this is technically possible or even that it happens, just read about the DoubleClick incidents.
If you don't care about how your personal information is collected then you don't understand some very basic American principals and some very basic economic principals either.
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|My fantasy? Those that will violate your privacy will just lie in their P3P. What's to stop them? And with your guard down because you're running IE6, it will be easier for them to take advantage of you. You're the one in a fantasy world that scum websites will follow a guideline like P3P just like criminals will follow some new law.
The real fantasy is that P3P will solve anything. Just make sure your REMOTE_USER & REMOTE_IDENT variables are blank and then any information that's recorded is done so anonymously and is therefore not an invasion of privacy. The only harm is ads more targeted to you or fewer pop-ups. How is that bad?
Tim
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|I like how 5 paragraphs/sentances have turned this into an aol issue. My friggin' heart just bleeds for steve case and his banner revenue, same goes for the people who sell out to their fascist sheepware.
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|I really hate pages with tons of banners, pop-ups and cookies. I think that our browsers should be more configurable so that we could choose wether if we want to read junk or not, or to have our privacy stolen or not. I always need a 3rd party utility (90% are full of bugs), which makes it very sad. I read somewhere that a company had to withdraw an ad-blocking app because lots of people were crying at them. LOL I'm not American, so I wonder why the hell do I have to be bombed every day with those silly banners about VISA, mortgages, this, that...
About cookies, I hate to see how many companies try to insert a file in your system. I remember that my cookie manager stopped up to 40 cookies while accessing netdrive.com one day. Amazing. And most of people simply don't care. Great.
I know that a lot of things on the Internet are free and all that stuff. But sincerely, I've been paying for my ISP since my first day of connection 3 years ago and never used free ISPs. Even though they promise you more services and bandwidth, this isn't always true. So I think I have the right to complain because I don't have EVERYTHING for free.
BTW I never click on those banners. They can go to hell. But I get angry with those images stealing bandwidth and dropping cookies.
Please more privacy, thank you!
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|problem with that? small sites will make even less what they make now (and 99% cant pay their bills) and you will see less and less small sites going away...plus some big ones... what then? ;-(
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|lapsus lingua I guess....I meant more and more small sites going away :)
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|Cookies are not always a bad thing. Cookies are what contain session variables. Without cookies everything would have to pass through the URL.
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|As a website owner and a MS betatester I was quite furious when I discovered that IE6 stopped my banners and cookies and therefore I bugreported the feature and asked MS to change default settings. They gave me a swift answer and changed the default settings to allow cookies and banner-ads.
But if you do not include a privacy-reference in your ad-tags you might see a yellow mark on the status-bar.
Personally I find IE6 a step towards a better future. Now we know that consumer-pressure really is heard by the software companies. Internet is hopefully still crawling in diapers, we will see changes as we try to get up standing. All the changes we have seen so far is the results of trying and failing, and we will still see this in the future.
The only proof we have that we; the users of internet have, is that we are able to force these changes.
So tell the manufacturers and lawmakers what you want and how to do things and I bet they will listen.
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|I think think that you're all referring to MSIE 6.0 build 2462, bcause that's the version that's having problems controlling certain cookies without the users consent. If you don't believe me find out for yourself. Try out 2462 then 2469 and see which operates better.
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|So basically banner ads are broken (boo hoo, that's really upsetting me) and companies that have vague privacy policies have to clarify them (boy that's a real shame, too).
The consumer gets more privacy at the cost of banner ads taking a hit and companies having to clarify their privacy policies. How exactly is this anything but good?
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|Yeah... and after all that, you will be the first to complain that you have to pay for content on the web, because no more banners will be displayed. Pretty cool actually !
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|Nothing is free. Someone somewhere is paying for it.
End result will be good when they get all the kinks out. But we have to remember that if it weren't for the ads on the web, many of the free web services we take for grandted wouldn't exsist. If the ad companies and their clients believe that their ads are not being displayed, they will no longer pay for them and the services will go away; and I'm not just talking about hotmail and yahoo. Many of my favorite hardware review sites are kept alive by sponsor ads.
Don't get me wrong, I have a severe dislike for ads and I really hate pop-ups and floaters. But reguardless of how I feel, I know why they exsist and what benefit they bring.
I use www.adsubtract.com to intercept ads and popups before they reach my browsers. It's configurable to the point where I can choose which web page ads I want to allow and support. There is a free version available.
Hmm, wonder how they can afford to do that? :)
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|I have no problem with ads - I have problems with privacy issues and ads that these advertising geniuses thing are so effective (HUGE ads, pop up ads, etc...).
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|No! I will be the first to REJOICE when I can pay a nominal fee to access content WITHOUT ads. The key here is nominal fee. Many sites dabbled with charging users, but they charged way too much. Slate, for example, which was trying to charge people like $9.95/mo or something. They're using ads now, but imagine if they charged people like $1 or $2 per month. I haven't run the numbers but I think many people would do that to get rid of ads where less than 1% are actually clicked. I think that might work better.
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|Hm, $9.95 is less than what I pay per week of a paper newspaper. And guess what - it's also loaded with ads, way more than any website I've seen.
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|issue is much deeper actually...problem is that only extremly small percent of people would pay (less than 0.5%) for content which makes people charge more...it same as with software...people are not used to pay for something they got for free before, and if you offer significant advantages to members, then few people will pay for it..end of story... if 20%-30% of people that actually use the site actually pay for it, even small fee of 2$-5$ a month, site owners would get enough money to survive...but we dont pay and they dont survive (unless they have a real job that finances the site but then they do not spend full time working on it)
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|Recent studies have shown approx. 90% of customers leave when instituting a pay model following a free model. The Wall Street Journal was able to make this work. As long as business know the stats going in, they should be able to calculate the viability of this business model for them.
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|Precisely - it's the same reason all the major networks carry the same sensational content - if they don't, nobody would watch. If one site charges, people will go to another site. The question at hand is whether the entire market of free content is changing. What if there aren't any "free" alternatives. Then the 90% either take it or leave it and I think that number will change.
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|Uhhhh... what the HELL are you thinking?!? Why would you want to pay AT ALL? It's free now, take it! Sheesh.
And um, if you're an avid reader like I am, and you start paying, say, $5 to read a site, and soon ALL your favorite sites do that, well, it's gonna add up... AND think about all the bills. Yah, that's fun! *rolls eyes*
Yes, revenue is generated with ads, but people support them under false pretense that people ACTUALLY click on them. I don't. Sure, some people do... but it's most effective when the advertising is geared towards yer interests. How do they do that? Invasion of privacy. Do I WANT that? No. So where's that leave us? Back at square one or until more radical and unwanted measures are taken... *sigh*
So, all in all, I think this P3P thang IE has going for it is great! As mentioned in an earlier post, this might bring up greater occurance of such undesireables as first-party porn pop-up ads, cookies, etc. This is where IE's "Trusted Sites" thing helps a bit, but if your "Trusted site" does "untrusted" things like pop-ups... well, time to muck with the HOSTS file in NT/2000/XP! ;)
Just my 53 billion dollars... it's too many cents!
-ShAdOWmoNkX :)
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|It's interesting that you use networks as an example. HBO is a pay service that is doing very well because it provides superior content.
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|I use Norton's Internet Security. It has many awesome features. It allows for complete cookie control as well as ad blocking. :) It blocks about 95% of the banner ads found on pages. This is good for me coz I have a dialup connection(a slow one at that) and it helps pages load faster.
That's my 2 cents...
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|Norton Internet security ? Why the hell would you worry about ad blocking. If you dont want ads just update your HOSTS file to make a url point to an ivalid IP. Example....Microsoft Outlook displays an add at the bottom when using your hotmail account, just update the hosts file to this
127.0.0.1 ads.msn.com
Bloaty norton software isnt needed.
my 3 cents
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|Or you can download the Internet Junkbuster proxy which takes care of blocking ads and cookies and is completely free! The latest version replaces banner ads with a transparent 1x1 gif. You can get the latest version from http://www.waldherr.org/junkbuster/.
You can find installation directions here: http://www.junkbusters.com/ht/en/ijbwin.html
javascript@yahoo.com
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|Gee what else is new? hehe...
I wonder where all the postings are about why AOL isn't P3P compliant, or really wanting to be because of their advertising revenues?
James
http://belprecomputerwizard.com
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|i dont think there is a site thats compliant ;)
and issue in question was cookies coming from other domains but websites...which means, doubleclick can not serve ads there...
sucks to be doubleclick :)
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|Well...Mozilla has the feature of blocking cookies from chosen sites or blocking images from them...
so MOZILLA ROCKS!!! YEah! ;)
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|At any rate, thank God for WebWasher, the best essential free utility ever made. :) ... www.webwasher.com
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|If I am reading this correctly, I think we will start to see more pop-up ads. Woohoo!
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|what's so good about seeing more popup ads? do you have a popup ad killer or something?
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|No you it means we will have less popups which means better for us. Micorsoft must have a reason that benifits them or they would not do it just to help us. We will soon find out what the reason is.
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|yea, they prolly want advertisers to pay them or something to be allowed access
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|This isn't MS's doing, it's the standard. The ads simply don't have p3p support.
What it means is that ads in general won't work, ads on a page are displayed in an iframe basically, and that calls up a webpage inside a webpage, so the ad will still get blocked unless it supports the P3P standard.
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|Actually AOL6 has an option to select not to receive pop-up ads. Evidently people got so angry with them that they were forced to add it to the configuration options. That was not the case in earlier versions.
Also, those who use CompuServe 2000, which is based on AOL6, can GO to keyword POPUPS, and there elect not to receive popup ads. Neither of these options has been widely advertised, so I suspect that only people who complain are made aware of them.
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|Only problem is no banners no hits.. no money..... More GOOD Websites fall. Banner market is already bad. It be a shame to see more good Sites fall because of this :(
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|My thinking:
I had a free sited hosted once that the host provided in exchange for banner ads. I copied the code that they provided into the top of my page and when I published I had banners. The code obviously linked to a third-party site that might of then placed cookies. In IE6 3rd party cookies are blocked.
Now if I instead inserted a simple JavaScript window.open with the 3rd party page as the URL then it would become 1st party in its own window and it could do what it wants. This is why I see more pop-up ads. Remember they are nothing more than another IE window.
I personally despise pop-up ads but I can see them becoming even more prolific.
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|Banner ads won't necessarily disappear, this just means they have to clean up their act or they won't be able to sell their product via banner ads. They have to respect the privacy of the online user.
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