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MSN UK fails IE6 privacy standards – apparently

Alternatively, we may just have a highly amusing bugette here...

One of the wondrous innovations in IE6 is its P3P-awareness. This is illustrated by the little warning sign you'll see at the bottom of the page if the site you're visiting doesn't have a privacy statement that is P3P-readable.

If you've got IE6, you can check this on The Register front page, because we don't have such a thing, and quite frankly we're a bit grouchy about having to go to the trouble of knocking one up. Hell, we've got a privacy statement. Mainly because IBM told us they wouldn't book ads if we didn't get one, but it's not always the thought that counts.

That's enough preamble. Aside from the (frankly, minor) hassle of knocking up a P3P-readable statement, you probably face the more ongoing hassle of making sure it keeps working. As is evidenced by these little snaps from around the Microsoft site. Here we have IE6's report on why it's flagged Microsoft Presspass with a yellow privacy warning. This one isn't too had, and is the one you'll generally get from sites that aren't P3P-compliant:

Presspass fails on P3P

Next, you'll see something much more worrying - a red one, flagging an unsatisfactory privacy policy being hosted by those nice people at msn.co.uk. Oh dear:

MSN Privacy Alert!

Finally, here's what's causing it - something to do with the ad serving. This is amusing, as The Reg's own yellow alert stems from Doubleclick, but it's still only yellow, not red like this:

Bet they steal your stuff...

No doubt you're wondering how you check this out yourself. It doesn't work if you go directly to msn.co.uk, but try this, if you have a Hotmail account and IE6. Log in to Hotmail, then log out again, and you'll get kicked onto msn.co.uk (if you're British, that is - you need a lot of stuff to verify this, but we did). Voila! MSN in privacy alert shock. ®

Thanks to Mat Moore for drawing this feature to our attention.

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