IE, Tracking Protection Lists, and Data Privacy with Anurag Pandit

Last week I had the opportunity to listen to a chat with Anurag Pandit. Anurag is a Product Manager with the Internet Explorer (IE) team, he looks after the security of the browsers to make sure online users are safe online. He explained what a Tracking Protection List is. I’ve actually never heard of the term before now. I’m sure my husband has mine set up for me and it’s set to not share at all.

“Tracking Protection Lists are like “Do Not Call” lists for third-party content on a website. By adding a “Tracking Protection List,” you can control whether your information is sent to third parties listed on the Tracking Protection List.”

A question was raised should we care who receives this kind of information? I mean do I really care who is watching my browser history. I don’t really care one way or the other really, but I do want to know why that site wants that information. So maybe I do care a little bit.

This WSJ article shows how online tracking is used to collect information and how it can be used by those collecting it
IE’s Tracking Protection Lists help prevent the websites you go to from automatically sending details about your visit to other content providers.
When you have a Tracking Protection List or Personalized Tracking Protection enabled, Internet Explorer 9 will send a Do Not Track preference or signal to the websites you visit. It will also send a Do Not Track preference to the third party websites that provides content on the websites you visit if those third party sites have not been blocked by your Tracking Protection List. Websites may continue to engage in activities you might view as tracking even though you have expressed this preference, depending on the website’s privacy practices.
Regarding Security: Internet Explorer has industry leading security enhancements built into it that can go a long way to help protect users. For example, SmartScreen protection can help block socially engineered malware – the types of malware that use social engineering techniques to trick users and infect computers. A study by NSS labs showed that Internet Explorer 9 was six times more effective against these types of attacks than the next browser.