microsoft edgethe Chromium-based web browser developed by the Redmond giant, is leaking or at least has been sending the URLs that users have been visiting to the Bing API website. The privacy issue was reported by users of the Reddit social network last week. According to their version, they noticed that the latest version of the application sends a request to bingapis.com with the URL of almost all the pages that the users had visited during the browsing sessions. Microsoft says it is investigating the reports.
A Reddit user named hackermchackface, who was the first to discover the data leak, said that “searching for references to this URL gives very few results, there is no documentation on this feature.” Other Reddit users started reporting the same issue, but not the reason why Microsoft Edge is sending URLs to the Bing API website. Because of that, The Verge decided to move on and ask Rafael Rivera, a software engineer and one of the EarTrumpet developers, to investigate the matter.
Rivera discovered that the data leak stemmed from a poorly implemented new feature in the browser. “Microsoft Edge now has a creator tracking feature that is enabled by default. It seems the intent was to notify Bing when you’re on certain pages, like YouTube, The Verge, and Reddit, but it doesn’t seem to work correctly when sending almost all domains that are visited to Bing”.
Microsoft began testing a creator tracking feature last year with the aim of implementing it in Edge. Said characteristic is designed in order to allow the user to follow content creators on portals such as YouTube, but apparently, due to its poor implementation, it has become some kind of bulk crawler that sends too much data to the Bing API website. Luckily, just disabling the feature presumably ends the privacy issue.
Feature to follow Microsoft Edge content creators.
Accusing an application of being a massive data leaker is not a tasteful dish, so Microsoft has set to work to investigate and try to find a solution. Caitlin Roulston, Microsoft’s director of communications, has stated the following for The Verge: “We are aware of the reports, are investigating and will take appropriate action to address any issues”. Of course, the corporation has not yet explained why the URLs are sent to the Bing API website or how Edge has been configured to send almost all URLs to said site.
Disabling the feature that allows you to follow Microsoft Edge content creators is easy. For this the user has to open the Settinggo to the section “Privacy, search and services” and then descend to the section Serviceswhere you have to uncheck the option “Show suggestions to follow creators in Microsoft Edge”. That should be enough to prevent browsing history leaks to the Bing API.
Microsoft has been trying for a long time to add value to its web browser by including some interesting features, such as the integration of Image Creator. However, it seems that this time it has backfired.
