Microsoft’s ‘Tracking Protection’ standard submission accepted by W3C

The Internet Explorer team has something to brag about: its submission to the W3C for ‘Tracking Submission‘ has been accepted.

Tracking Protection, an important component of the upcoming version of Internet Explorer, IE9, is now “an Internet Standard to help protect consumer privacy.” In the blog post on the matter, Microsoft called for the same type of collaboration that has been demonstrated with HTML5 to be applied to protecting consumer privacy online.

Tracking Protection was released to the public with the distribution of the release candidate build of Internet Explorer 9, which is available for download.

According to Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft’s Vice President for Internet Explorer:

“Consumers and governments around the world have signaled that they are deeply concerned about their privacy online. As part of Microsoft’s continuing commitment to online privacy, the company delivered Tracking Protection in IE9 RC earlier this month, a feature that enables users to opt-out of online tracking or block content that does the tracking.

Microsoft’s privacy submission to the W3C ensures that Tracking Protection is fully interoperable and can be used universally. Microsoft believes that all customers should have the opportunity to control their online experience.”

While tracking protection may or may not find a home in other major browsers, it is always refreshing to see Microsoft boast about not only how standards compliant they are, but how they are actually managing to build and grow the standards that they for so long eschewed.

Update/Edit: Via Microsoft:

“You state that “Microsoft’s ‘tracking protection’ accepted by W3C as Internet Standard.” [T[o clarify, [..] Microsoft’s submission for it to become a standard was accepted, not the actual tracking protection.”