This article from The Wall Street Journal offers a fascinating glimpse into some inner workings at Microsoft. The short version of the story: the IE team was building in some pretty powerful anti-tracking technology into IE 8.0; Microsoft’s ad business got wind of it; the functionality got quashed or crippled. Microsoft's ad group saw the privacy controls as a significant threat to their business: namely, that curbing data collection reduces the effectiveness of advertising. The article notes:

“When Microsoft released the browser in its final form in March 2009, the privacy features were a lot different from what its planners had envisioned. The feature, called InPrivate Filtering, isn’t turned on by default, and resets to OFF every time the browser closes down."

According to the article, the two sides faced off, and Microsoft “convened a four-hour meeting…to allow outside organizations to voice their concerns, including the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the Online Publishers' Association and the American Association of Advertising Agencies.” Sounds like a pretty stacked deck. What about organizations representing the privacy side, such as EPIC or EFF?

Microsoft’s CPO was involved. But I wonder where the Trustworthy Computing (TWC) team was in all this? Here’s an excerpt from TWC’s  privacy page: