Microsoft has officially pulled an about face, and the company will no longer be flipping on the "Do Not Track" setting by default for Internet Explorer. Or, to be more specific, the company will no longer have the "Do Not Track" option enabled in Windows' Express Settings—the bit you can click when you're installing the operating system, in case you're feeling lazy about customizing some of Windows' settings and would prefer Microsoft make the decisions for you.
Do Not Track, for those unaware, is a little setting that you can enable in all of the major Web browsers. Presumably, advertisers are supposed to notice when a browser has the flag flipped on. If that's the case, third-party advertisers should then exclude that browser from any kind of cross-site tracking. Though, the request is just that—a request that third-party services should follow, but don't necessarily have to.
What Do Not Track makes up for in privacy, it trades away in convenience—a little bit.
"Do Not Track may interfere with some personalized services you enjoy. For example, a Do Not Track request might mean you would have to type in your zip code each time you want to view a weather report, rather than seeing the weather automatically displayed. Personalization on websites can save you time and repetitive typing, but it requires data," reads Mozilla's description.
As for Microsoft, it's not as if the company doesn't want Windows users to make use of Do Not Track. It flipped the feature on by default for Internet Explorer 10 but, in doing so, managed to do just as much harm as good. Though a noble gesture, Microsoft's decision to make this a default in Windows' Express Settings, rather than a choice that users have to specifically select themselves, ran contrary to the World Wide Web Consortium's spec for the feature. As a result, advertisers started saying that they would refuse to honor these requests from Internet Explorer 10.
Oof.
"Put simply, we are updating our approach to DNT to eliminate any misunderstanding about whether our chosen implementation will comply with the W3C standard. Without this change, websites that receive a DNT signal from the new browsers could argue that it doesn't reflect the users' preference, and therefore, choose not to honor it," reads a blog post from Brendon Lynch, Microsoft's chief privacy officer.
"As a result, DNT will not be the default state in Windows Express Settings moving forward, but we will provide customers with clear information on how to turn this feature on in the browser settings should they wish to do so. This change will apply when customers set up a new PC for the first time, as well as when they upgrade from a previous version of Windows or Internet Explorer."