By Madison Ruppert | End The Lie

Representatives Joe Barton (R-Texas) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) called out the massive Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) – a group of advertising trade groups – for their statement which advised companies to completely ignore the already weak privacy features of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

The DAA’s statement was far from surprising given the fact that the industry is in fact focused on data mining. Considering the troubling developments like Google’s patented technology which can tailor advertisements based on environmental information like background sounds, this effort to collect massive amounts of data which is then passed off to government agencies will only get more intense.

While Reps. Barton and Markey aren’t bringing the issue of the collaboration between companies like Google and the U.S. intelligence community, their privacy concerns are inextricably linked.

Markey and Barton co-chair the Bipartisan Privacy Caucus and, in addressing the DAA’s statement, said the advertising industry is putting “profits over privacy.”

The DAA’s statement comes after Microsoft announced this June that they will make Microsoft’s Internet Explorer’s default setting one which requests that third-party advertisers do not track the browsing activity of users.

However, as the previous sentence might have made clear to some, this is a request. It does not force the advertisers to not track you.

Note: If you want to avoid as much tracking as possible (which is getting increasingly difficult) please explore my easily followed guides available here and here and implement as many of the methods as you can.

“The other major Web browsers also offer a “Do Not Track” feature, but Explorer was the first to have the setting as its default,” Brendan Sasso of The Hill rightly points out.

The industry’s perspective on the Do Not Track issue is even more absurd when one realizes that just 8.6 percent of people who use the desktop version of Mozilla Firefox have enabled the Do Not Track feature.

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