Microsoft's chief privacy officer, Brendon Lynch, made it crystal clear.

"We believe turning on Do Not Track by default in IE10 on Windows 8 is an important step in this process of establishing privacy by default, putting consumers in control and building trust online," Lynch wrote in a .

But the W3C group that's been hammering out DNT disagreed, and said flatly that while Microsoft is perfectly free to do what it wants, it cannot call IE10 DNT compliant if it continues down its on-by-default road.

"Microsoft IE, as a general purpose user agent, will not be able to claim compliance with DNT once we have a published W3C Recommendation," Aleecia McDonald, a researcher at Stanford's Center for Internet and Society (CIS) and a part-time employee of Mozilla, said in a . Mozilla supports her work as co-chair of the W3C effort on DNT.

"As a practical matter, they can continue their current default settings, since DNT is a voluntary standard in the first place. But if they claim to comply with the W3C Recommendation and do not, that is a matter the FTC (and others) can enforce," McDonald said.