IE 8: Privacy - It's about more than cookies

Posted By: Charles | Aug 25th @ 12:46 PM

When you navigate your browser to website A is website A the only site you're visiting?

IE 8 Beta 2 is almost out of the oven. Given this, we of course want to find out all about it straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. Enter General Manager of Team Internet Explorer, Dean Hachamovitch, and Program Manager Andy Zeigler. The topic of this particular conversation (other IE8 interviews are in the pipeline) is a complex and important one: User Privacy and what IE 8 will do to inform users and protect their personal information when surfing the Internet.

Dean and the IE team are very passionate (and very serious about) user privacy. It’s a hard problem for a browser to solve, but a browser is the first line of defense and can therefore supply users with helpful information regarding what websites are involved with a particular session. Andy Zeigler is the Program Manager of the new Privacy features in IE 8. Dean and Andy shed light onto exactly what's been done in the realm of Privacy in IE 8 Beta 2. Two core new Privacy mechanisms are present in IE 8: InPrivate Browsing and InPrivate Blocking (with InPrivate Subscriptions, a feed-based blocking service). We of course address more than the What, however, as you'd expect from Channel 9. Is true privacy on the Internet even achievable (is anonymity possible given the architecture and implementation of the Internet)? What role can a web browser play in protecting a user's personally identifiable data?

Tune in. This is a great conversation.

Tags: IE8, Privacy

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Comments (14)

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DukeNukem

Really looking forward to this "private surf" button.

What freaks me out sometimes is when i visit a site I've never been to before and it asks me to fill in a nickname and i click the textfield it already shows autocompleten "DukeNukem". Where did they get that ?

One button to disable autocomplete and caprerings things to put into autocomplete really is a very very very nice feature ! Don't want girlfriend to see what gift I was going to buy for her...

Just hope it doesn't become:

SURF FAST SURFT SLOW
<--------------------------------------------->
SURF PUBLIC SURFT PRIVATE

EDIT:

Just noticed 'autocomplete' turnoff isn't mensioned on the Ie-blog anywhere. It should be turn off if somebody is private. Because, if someone should use my laptop for something, i would FORSE them to go into private so they don't get to see where I went and what I searched for. (not only the other way arround) Without losing all my intellisence when i get my computer back.

La Bomba
Boing!

Great stuff gentleman, a very interesting and important topic. Smiley

jason818_253.33
Yippi skippy

I had a visitor use my computer. Once they were done with it I keep getting junk mail delivered to my email address with the visitor’s name. At this point its just annoying but its also a little creepy to think that some how my email address is getting out there just by browsing the internet.

littleguru
allein, allein,... allein, allein!

Nice video. I'm looking forward to the IE8 beta2 Smiley

Linux.Liberation.Front

And whats about the Phishing protection build in into IE8 ?

If IE8 connects to the Microsoft Servers everytime to check an unknown URL there is the possibility that microsoft saves the IP and the requested URL.
So it might be possible to track the user behavior even if this privacy option is enabled, Microsoft says that they do not save the antiphishing URL requests but i dont trust them enough.
I still prefer Firefox because the list of Phishing sites is saved in an local cache so it does not connect to the firefox or google servers to request Informations for the URLs.

littleguru
allein, allein,... allein, allein!

In reply to Linux.Liberation.Front

#Aug 26th @ 7:39 AM

Well. It does. The first time that the phishing information is requested. I'm also sure that the Firefox phishing information is not saved forever in the local cache. There is of course an expiration date on that otherwise missclassified websites would always look like phishing sites to your Firefox installation.

In IE7 it is only two clicks to disable the phishing protection. I can't see why that would change in IE8.

Bas
It finds lightbulbs.

So if privacy mode automatically blocks third party content.. that means instant ad-block, right?

stevo_
Casablanca != Manchester

In reply to Bas

#Aug 26th @ 10:21 AM

Meh, privacy is great and all that - and private browsing sounds like a good feature, but when I hear from the IE team I want them to talk about how their making IE better for developers, thats where IE is really dying ..

Mozilla enables native jitting for javascript on ff3, and MS talks about adding "private browsing" to IE.. sigh

dumky

The guys in this videos have the smile of a cat who just ate the goldfish.

They are basically sneaking an ad-blocker into IE, under guise of privacy.
Just like AdBlock Plus, they don't take the responsibility of which urls get blocked, they let people publish filtersets (Subscriptions).
Ad blocking has not been a huge concern for the industry so far, because it is not that mainstream. But having it built into IE8 would make that possible.
Ad networks and web analytics providers are going to love this one.

This is not a new issue (http://blog.monstuff.com/archives/000230.html), but it continues growing in momentum...