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IE mouse tracking claims may have had alternative motives

A few days ago, Spider.io made a rather bold claim that Internet Explorer had a mouse tracking exploit that Microsoft refused to fix. Since then, Microsoft quickly responded by refuting the claims and has now also penned a much longer post on its IE blog at MSDN.

Dean Hachamovitch, corporate vice president for Microsoft's Internet Explorer team, took to the site to state that Microsoft is “actively working to adjust this behavior in IE.” Dean further states that, from what they know, this “has more to do with competition between analytics companies than consumer safety or privacy.”

In the post, Dean also points out that the only folks using this exploit are competitors to Spider.io and, from what we gather, Spider.io might be looking to harm its competitors services by crying wolf at the mouse tracking exploit.

It’s quite simple really: Spider.io has competitors that are using a mouse tracking technique that they do not utilize, so why not make a bunch of noise about the issue in hopes that Microsoft closes the hole and effectively harms your competitors at the same time? It’s a win-win for Spider.io as they appear to be the good guys in reporting the issue and they get to hurt how their competitors operate.

Whatever the reason behind Spider.io’s motive, Microsoft is responding and is actively working to fix this issue.

Source: Microsoft

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