http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703467304575383530439838568.html

The IE8 design team had planned on adding the best privacy features available, but the advertising executives wanted to track users.

'In the end, the product planners lost a key part of the debate. The winners: executives who argued that giving automatic privacy to consumers would make it tougher for Microsoft to profit from selling online ads. Microsoft built its browser so that users must deliberately turn on privacy settings every time they start up the software.'

Please use Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome.

That's a very interesting article from The Wall Street Journal. It also cross-links to a WSJ blog article How to Use Microsoft’s InPrivate Filtering which gives more information, including a link to the second page of a PC Magazine article with further instructions on blocking ads in IE8 Internet Explorer 8: Nine Things You Didn't Know You Could Do -- scroll down to item 6 "Block Ads with InPrivate Filtering and Third-Party Filters".

There's a whole cottage industry out there which converts block lists used for Firefox into the XML format required by IE8 for you to import. You need to be able to edit the Registry to make it work every time you start IE, but there are pre-written REG files for you to do that as well.

All this works only in IE8, not IE7 or earlier.

.

You think Google respects your privacy? Dream on; they collect more information than anyone. Chrome is not the browser for those who want to avoid being tracked on the Web.

If you like the Chrome browser, but don't want Google to track everything you do, try:-

Chromium, ChromePlus, or SRWare Iron.

SRWare have a page that lists all the tracking that Chrome does, but which has been removed in Iron:

Comparism of Iron and Chrome at privacy.

.

It might be more accurate to say that "Microsoft marketing does not want to improve privacy of IE", rather than Microsoft as a whole. I understand the sentiment, but when the product group makes a product, management is paying for it. If they want it to be less secure so that marketing can push ads, development complies or finds a new job .

It might be more accurate to say that "Microsoft marketing does not want to improve privacy of IE", rather than Microsoft as a whole. I understand the sentiment, but when the product group makes a product, management is paying for it. If they want it to be less secure so that marketing can push ads, development complies or finds a new job .

Yeah, the Microsoft marketing team did not want to improve the privacy of IE.

The Microsoft developer team did want to improve the privacy of IE.

But in the end of the day, the Microsoft marketing team won.

So the end result is Microsoft could have provided improved privacy but did not.