I’m running Office XP at home, mainly because I have to support the E-mail client it uses, and it added Smart Tag’s to my IE. I know there is a command you can put on a web page that prevents smart tags from being added, but is there anything I as an end user can do (besides removing Office XP)
Microsoft supposedly removed Smart Tags from the final browser in XP, but you can be sure they’ll return. There is code you can put in your web pages (EACH web page) to disable Smart Tags. The only site I know of that details how to prevent your websites from being tagged is here:
But alas The Reg is a little screwed up today, the page won’t load. Try it again in a day or 2.
Basically, there’s nothing you can do but remove the offending software.
There are meta tags that can be added to a web page’s HTML to disable Smart Tags on that page. You can get details here: http://smarttags.manilasites.com/
However, this solution relies on every web page you visit being modified to disable the tags. Most pages won’t be modified, at least not until Smart Tags go into general release, so unless you remove the offending program from your system, you’ll still be subjected to Microsoft arbitrarily editing all the content you read on the web.