Third party cookie targeting is getting a bad wrap at the minute. Having been demonised by a serious of biased pieces by Emily Steel and colleagues at the pay wall friendly, WSJ, the cookie has few friends in most political quarters. Both the EU and US are about to introduce strict legislation protecting online privacy. The new EU directive is particularly draconian. It is requesting a hard opt-in for all site using third party cookies. To say it's not gone down well in the digital media industry would be an understatement. Now we are seeing browsers getting in on the user privacy act. The new IE9 bowser, which was released this week, includes blocking lists for sites performing third party "tracking".

IE9 is making these block lists available on iegallery.com. The site is not live yet - but one of the approved lists can be downloaded from Abine, an online privacy company. The list makes for interesting reading as it contains a number of high profile ad networks, exchanges, SSPs, and analytics companies. There's no sign of Doubleclick or Atlas domains in there.

I did try to add sites manually - but it looks like you can only upload approved lists into the Tracking Protection settings. So it looks like Microsoft is protecting its Atlas business. Smart. It'll be interesting to see who turns up on the other lists. Either way IE9 has thrown a spanner in the works with the introduction of these block lists. And if you think things couldn't get any hysterical, you should watch Microsoft's video on tracking protection.