On President’s Day, February 20th, Microsoft accused Google of bypassing Internet Explorer’s privacy settings in a Microsoft Software Developer Network posting by Dean Hachamovitch, Corporate Vice President of IE. Google’s Rachel Whetstone, Senior Vice President of Communications and Policy, replied that, “Microsoft omitted important information from its blog post today.”

Specifically, Whestone states that “Microsoft uses a “self-declaration” protocol (known as “P3P” [Platform for Privacy Preferences Project]) dating from 2002 under which Microsoft asks websites to represent their privacy practices in machine-readable form. It is well known – including by Microsoft – that it is impractical to comply with Microsoft’s request while providing modern web functionality. We have been open about our approach, as have many other Websites.”

Indeed, Facebook doesn’t work with Microsoft’s P3P policy either. A Facebook representative said, “P3P was developed 5 years ago and is not effective in describing the practices of a modern social networking service and platform. Instead, we have posted a public notice describing our practices that is consistent with Section 3.2 of P3P. We have reached out directly to Microsoft in hopes of developing additional solutions and we would welcome the opportunity to work with W3 to update P3P to account for the advances in social networking and the web since 2007.”

Not so fast Microsoft! Google fires back at MS privacy claims. More >