I gotta tell ya’, have little to no sympathy for website publishers that complain about Internet Explorer’s third-party cookie privacy standards on the basis that it makes it harder for them to generate effective advertisements. The protections were put into IE mostly at the behest of concerned consumers, who didn’t want their viewing habits on editorial websites to be known and tracked by advertisers; web bugs were becoming out-of-control, and users frequently had no idea which domains were able to garner information about their viewing habits, even on relatively well-known websites. All Microsoft did was took a well-known standard, advocated by the Network Advertising Initiative and passed by the World Wide Web Consortium, and implemented it in Internet Explorer.

My personal favorite is that the biggest critic in this article is iVillage, whose site maintainers also admit that they haven’t deigned to add P3P-compliant statements to their sites’ privacy policies. Let’s get this straight: in order to make your advertising work, you have to add statements to your sites’ templates that codify your privacy practices. You haven’t done so… so you blame Microsoft?

Next week, we can expect an article from a company complaining that they have to remove all <blink> and <marquee> tags from their website because modern browsers don’t support them.