Last week, a report in the Wall Street Journal revealed that Google and some other advertising companies were bypassing privacy settings to follow users browsing through Safari on their iPhones and on the Web which has sine lead to three U.S. lawmakers calling the FTC to investigate further. Now Microsoft has claimed that Google is doing the same for its browser, Internet Explorer as well.

All Things D reports that Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Internet Explorer, Dean Hachamovitch, has written in a blog post that Google is using similar methods, though the actual bypass mechanism is different, to get around default privacy protections in Internet Explorer in order to track users with cookies. Microsoft says that by default IE blocks third-party cookies, unless the site presents a “P3P Compact Policy Statement” in which case the the site will use the cookie but ultimately won’t track the users.

Microsoft said it has contacted Google and asked them to commit to Microsoft’s standard privacy settings for browser users. “In the event that Google continues this practice”, states the blog post, Microsoft has offered a Tracking Protection List that Internet Explorer 9 users can add as a protection if they wish.

Google has responded to the above allegations by saying that the software giant has omitted important information in its blog post. The statement reads: “Microsoft uses a ‘self-declaration’ protocol (P3P) dating from 2002 under which Microsoft asks websites to represent their privacy practices in machine-readable form. It is well known — including by Microsoft — that it is impractical to comply with Microsoft’s request while providing modern web functionality. We have been open about our approach, as have many other websites.”

Google also went on to mention that in 2010, a research report from Carnegie Mellon University revealed that more than 11,000 of 33,139 Web sites were not issuing valid P3P policies as requested by Microsoft and the policy is widely considered as optional.