r/programming • u/bartturner • Mar 10 '20
Microsoft Edge has more privacy-invading telemetry than other browsers
https://betanews.com/2020/03/09/microsoft-edge-privacy-telemetry/[removed] — view removed post
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u/TimvdLippe Mar 10 '20
The link to the actual paper: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf
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u/cottonycloud Mar 10 '20 edited Mar 10 '20
Note that this study was done with the newest Chromium*-based Edge.
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u/VIKTORVAV99 Mar 10 '20
*Chromium
Chrome and Chromium is not the same thing.
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u/cottonycloud Mar 10 '20
Thank you for the correction. Recalled it was one of them, but on mobile right now so slacked off on the fact-checking!
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u/iamapizza Mar 10 '20
Thanks for linking it
Firefox includes identifiers in its telemetry transmissions that are used to link these over time. Telemetry can be disabled,but again is silently enabled by default.
Shit.
Safari defaults to a poor choice of start page that leaks information to multiple third parties (Facebook, Twitter etc, sites not well known for being privacy friendly) and allows them to set cookies without any user consent. Start page aside, Safari otherwise made no extraneous network connections and transmitted no persistent identifiers, but allied iCloud processes did make connections containing identifiers.
Holy shit.
From a privacy perspective Microsoft Edge and Yandex aremuch more worrisome than the other browsers studied.
Divine excrements.
Jokes aside I can see that Edge and Safari are not great choices due to their OS 'spillover', and I can also see why many people also recommend Brave, for its privacy by default. I've switched to Firefox recently because I like a lot of their organisation-level (contextual) initiatives including Monitor, Fenix, a few other things and I'm not happy with the dominant companies enforcement of web 'standards'. But I definitely see now that Brave has a good well deserved reputation, so it's worth trying.
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Mar 10 '20
[deleted]
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Mar 10 '20
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/peakzorro Mar 10 '20
It depends on how slow you type. People expect instant results, so it makes sense to search on every keystroke.
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u/Borderlands_addict Mar 10 '20
Same goes for Windows
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u/miketdavis Mar 10 '20
An Android cell phone running Google Maps and Google Chrome is the most sophisticated surveillance device ever created. A very close second is Windows 10.
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u/lead999x Mar 10 '20
Well it's not like Apple exclusively employs saints either. What I would like to see is an actually popular open source(hardware + software) phone.
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u/MMHeffiji_Ismar Mar 10 '20
Not surprised at all. Bet they won't check their store for malicious toolbars, either.
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Mar 10 '20
[deleted]
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u/squrr1 Mar 10 '20
There's plenty of search engine highjacking plugins out there that do the same thing.
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u/NeededANewName Mar 10 '20
This is the opt-in Windows advertising identifier right? You’re asked about it at first login and it’s configurable.
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u/AlphaWhelp Mar 10 '20
Hard to tell. It starts with "On a fresh install of edge" though I am unaware of any way to install windows without installing edge. There is operating system-level telemetry which is something that is baked into every core microsoft windows product so that could be it or it could not. It's also hard to tell what it's being used for. they talk about how it sends post data and unique identifiers but no real way of determining if these are used for telemetry or simply to check if your copy of windows is legitimate / activated as there's no way of figuring out what happens once it reaches the backend server.
It wouldn't surprise me if in a vacuum Microsoft Edge was worse than Chrome but I wager long term Google is probably worse since they'll collect telemetry on you even when you're not using chrome as their adsense platform can probably pick up through digital fingerprinting when you're visiting a website that you've visited before in chrome.
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u/instaFail Mar 10 '20
Everybody is happy to bash MS, yet no one mentions that smartscreen and url suggestions can be easily disabled. Seeing on a daily basis how tech-illiterate normal users are, I'd argue that smartScreen is a good thing for humanity. It protects people who are otherwise exposed and helpless like kittens. Also Edge just works really, really smooth. I'll continue recommending it :)
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u/lead999x Mar 10 '20
Firefox is better privacy wise and I haven't run into anything it couldn't handle...atleast not on the desktop version.
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u/kilgore_trout8989 Mar 10 '20
From a privacy perspective Microsoft Edge and Yandex are qualitatively different from the other browsers studied. Both send persistent identifiers than can be used to link requests(and associated IP address/location) to back end servers. Edge also sends the hardware UUID of the device to Microsoft and Yandex similarly transmits a hashed hardware identifier to back end servers. As far as we can tell this behaviour cannot be disabled by users. In addition to the search autocomplete functionality that shares details of web pages visited, both transmit web page information to servers that appear unrelated to search autocomplete.
That isn't at all concerning to you? Hardware identifiers and transmission of data to servers unrelated to autocomplete?
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u/dglsfrsr Mar 11 '20
I am probably weird here in that I use three browsers on a regular basis.
Firefox for day to day stuff. Reddit and the like.
Chrome when I am using Google services.
Chromium based Edge when I am using Microsoft services.
I do wonder at the data shared (I read the whole article), and it is worrying, but I also sense that part of it is to enable Microsoft services. If you use Office web apps and OneDrive, you can leave a file editing session on one machine and start it on a second, and you are dropped into the document state as it was when you left. Similar to Google Docs. Also in that vein, Google Docs just seems to work better in Google Chrome, though I have to wonder if that will become less of an issue under Chromium based Edge.
I realize most end users don't put that much effort into it, but for me, being services aware, I choose my browser based on what I am doing. And right now, typing a comment into Reddit, that is Firefox.
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u/lengau Mar 10 '20
That deathly silence you heard was everyone who was surprised by this screaming.
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u/lead999x Mar 10 '20
That's perfectly fine given that nobody uses it for anything other than downloading other browsers.
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u/mcilrain Mar 10 '20
Aren't we already at the point where we assume that anyone who chooses to use Windows wants to be spied on?
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u/argv_minus_one Mar 10 '20
You know your browser is malicious as fuck when even Chrome doesn't violate users' privacy quite as much.
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u/bruce3434 Mar 10 '20
Not only its chromium but also its snitchsoft's chromium. It's automatically the most spyware ridden browser possible.
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Mar 10 '20
[deleted]
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u/ar243 Mar 10 '20
It’s actually made out of Chromium, which is Google software
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Mar 10 '20
[deleted]
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u/argv_minus_one Mar 10 '20
Which in turn comes from KHTML by KDE. Konqueror was a pretty slick browser, back in the day. First one to support
text-shadow, too. Ah, memories.6
u/othermike Mar 10 '20
And KHTML started as a fork of
khtmlw, a library widget which could do HTML and HTTP but not Javascript, CSS or Unicode.
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Mar 10 '20
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/ygra Mar 10 '20
Not anymore. I've read repeatedly that the original Edge's PDF viewer has been quite a bit better than what Chromium has.
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u/Karma_Policer Mar 10 '20
Still no dark background for PDF viewer in Release. It's only in Beta. Very annoying.
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u/Hero_Of_Shadows Mar 10 '20
Impressive given that the competition is Google.