Microsoft has announced that their next browser release IE10 would ship with ‘Do Not Track’ functionality turned on by default.

This is good news for user privacy but bad news for the online advertising industry.

Microsoft is a very small player in this market so they are not affected by their own move much. But it would hurt other players like Google who track user activity online to show better ads.

Users can of course already manually tell ad networks to not follow them. But this is a browser based feature which is yet to become an industry standard.

Internet Explorer 10 to have it enabled by default could result in a revolt by the advertising industry. They might kill their support for this feature completely considering users are not opting it for it but are being included by default if they use IE10 as their default browser.

Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox are other two browsers which are now supporting this new standard but not by default. Google Chrome does not support it yet.