The company's heavy-handed, but potentially effective, PR assault on Google heats up based on a WSJ report that Google sneaked past Safari's privacy settings.

Microsoft is clearly looking for any ammunition it can find to criticize Google and win over Internet users.

Today, Microsoft seized on a Wall Street Journal report that Google sidestepped privacy settings in Apple's Safari browser to track Internet users. The Journal story said the search giant and other ad companies used special code to get around Safari's privacy controls in order to track users on computers and mobile devices.

"Apparently, Google has been able to track users of Apple's Safari browser while they surf the web on their Apple iPhones, iPads and Macs," Ryan Gavin, General Manager for Internet Explorer Business and Marketing, wrote in a blog posted today. "This type of tracking by Google is not new. The novelty here is that Google apparently circumvented the privacy protections built into Apple's Safari browser in a deliberate, and ultimately, successful fashion."

Beyond getting in yet another dig at Google over privacy concerns, Gavin took the opportunity to tout Microsoft's own Internet Explorer browser.

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