Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Remember, violating the terms of a published privacy policy is one of the few ways a chain can actually get into serious trouble over online privacy with the otherwise largely toothless FTC. It was a privacy policy violation that resulted in Google being hit with a $22.5 million FTC settlement in July.

So online retailers really need to observe those customer preferences if that’s what their privacy policies say. And when feuding vendors start adjusting their products in ways that make it hard for retailers to figure out what customers actually prefer, that becomes impossible.

Yes, that’s stupid. It means chains using Apache (historically, that list has included Walmart, Walgreens, CVS and McDonald’s, among others) will have to look for that code when it’s time to test upgrades, strip it out and then test to make sure nothing else has broken. It’s a little extra work that nobody should have to do, but retailers can’t afford to simply ignore the Do Not Track settings.

It also means retailers will have to figure out how they’re going to deal with Internet Explorer users who don’t change the default Do Not Track setting. Everyone has assumed that only a small number of customers would take the trouble to turn on Do Not Track; with Microsoft’s default setting, it could eventually be as many as half of all browsers.

So retailers whose E-Commerce setup is designed to bounce customers cleanly from one site to another could face a mess trying to do that without violating their privacy policies. The only practical way might be to explicitly ask online customers to opt in to online tracking while on the retailer’s sites—that is, reversing Microsoft’s default opt out on a case-by-case basis.

Or retailers could have to deal with the publicity fallout if they decide just to change their privacy policies to say that they’ll no longer observe customers’ Do Not Track preferences. (Actually, only the first few retailers to make that type of change will have fallout. After that, everyone else will be able to follow suit and the watchdogs will be too busy to notice. OK, who wants to go first?)

None of this should be necessary. The whole idea behind the voluntary Do Not Track standard was to keep the user-tracking problem out of the hands of bureaucrats and legislators while minimizing the problems for customers and retailers, among others.

Instead, it’s turning into a fight between vendors that will put retailers squarely in the sights of the FTC and make some E-Commerce sites much harder for customers to use.