Microsoft Edge ignores user wishes, slurps tabs from Chrome without permission Windows users, take notice: Microsoft's Edge browser is said to be actively importing open Chrome tabs and slurping other data from Google's browser without permission and even if the "feature" that makes that happen is disabled. Buried within Edge's browser settings on Windows PCs is code that goes well beyond a one-time …
So if you normally run Edge because you’ve got MS359, and you use Chrome to access some system based on Google apps, and said apps containing GDPR-protected data, if Edge now slurps that and exports it to some random server outside of required country boundary, MS is in for one heck of a bill from national authorities.
It's not really a GDPR issue, as someone has said unless your tabs contain peoples names, DOB, social security numbers etc.
The UK Act that covers this is the Computer Misuse Act 1990, specifically the section starting "Unauthorised, or malicious, access to material stored on a computer.".
Getting the authorities to act on this though is another thing. I believe the last event that prompted the government to act, was Prince Phillip's Prestel account being hacked by journalists. "Prestel" I hear you say. "What's that?". Exactly!
Tab may imply personal or senstive personal informaiton. e.g. if a significant number of tabs feature cancer, or specific types of cancer then coupled with an IP address (which is personal information currently) then this may be seen to be correlating a health condition with an individual which equals special category data. MS will not have lawfully obtained consent to take this data in this way.
It doesn't matter if it would be impossible for you or I to correlate this information, MS has extensive records on users and the processing power to carry out that matching exercise.
Similary it can be enougn to have the tab for any employment union open, union membership being considered special category data.
A letter to any EU regulator should at least be enough to make MS consider if this might affect its share price in the short term at least.
Hypothetically, a web address could be entered with username/password information allowing access to personal information. If that URL was slurped, wouldn't that be significantly overstepping the bounds for gdpr as it would give access to your private data ...?
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Certainly, yes. YouTube has various tech vidbloggers who have addressed this. My (unused, on standby) Win11 installation certainly is a local user account - in the American vernacular, ain't no way I'm allowing a Microsoft account on my computer (I also don't keep my evil empire Google account on my phone, as well).
Don't use Google apps, use apps from a trusted APK repo or FOSS apps instead (for my needs, they're sufficiently equivalent and in some cases better), Force stop and disable Playstore Services. Don't allow location to skim wireless or bluetooth (just GPS for location is fine). Use Firefox to browse & DuckDuckGo to search and uBlock Origin, Facebook container & Privacy Badger browser plugins
I'm sure there's more but I did all this ages ago and I have a much lower presence on the Web than most - some leakage is inevitable but you can only do what you can do.
Hello, wondering whether the good, kind, and devastatingly attractive people at The Register could take a look at the Windows service executable known as msedgewebview2.exe? It's called by other apps like Zoom and Adobe products to do things like present interactive content within the host app. Blocking it w/firewall breaks some features of those apps. Microsoft updates this app a lot, and it's getting called by (or is calling?) msedge.exe a lot when the Edge browser itself is not open. TIA!
Seems like this data slurping only happens if you have previous chosen to sync Edge with another browser. I'm not saying there is any excuse for this behaviour, just that people anal enough to read every pop-up (like myself) might avoid this. If you chose not to sync when you first launched Edge (sorry, when Windows first launched Edge) and have never manually chosen to sync since then, then this 'slurp on start-up' isn't enabled. At least that's how it looks, who can tell what's going on in the background. I refuse to tell Edge what my Microsoft account is, so I can't check what would be stored in the cloud, for my convenience.
I use Edge for the Google apps my company makes me use and Chrome for the Microsoft apps and Firefox for my browsing. I like to think this helps reduce tracking but that's probably wishful thinking. The more steps you take to avoid being tracked the more unique your browser fingerprint becomes. I'm not ready to give up trying though.
Well, ideally the intended feature was first porting over all your stuff when you first installed Edge or set up a new user in it. Then for some reason they thought people would want to be able to do things in another browser on a regular basis and then have Edge check and port all that over every time you opened it...for some reason. Because obviously when you go use another browser to do something, you want to then switch back and do the same thing in Edge later on.
Yeah, MS browsers have a bad habit of staying open without your knowledge.
I first noticed this when I ran CCleaner. It asked me to close Edge before continuing, when I had closed Edge hours before.
I was NOT a happy camper.
I.E. Explorer also used to cache your Internet activity from another browser. Also while supposedly closed. It's one of the reasons I started using CCleaner religiously.
Never, never, NEVER ever trust MS.
Yeah, MS browsers have a bad habit of staying open without your knowledge
Opens iTerm session, does a "ps -ef | grep -i edge", returns no results..
Oh yes - that'll be because I'm on a Mac (which, yes, has its own issues but isn't (yet) as fully-loaded with pervasive spyware as Windows). And using Little Snitch I can tweak exactly what gets to the outside world and where.
>> Yeah, MS browsers have a bad habit of staying open without your knowledge.
All browsers try to do that now. It's intended to "accelerate" them by having everything running already so when you click on the icon all it's doing is generating a window, just like clicking the New Tab button.
Internet Explorer never "cached your Internet activity from another browser", whatever that means. For one thing, that makes no sense grammatically or technically, and for another IE was so old and dumb that things like all this common browser engine stuff wasn't happening at the time that it was still being actively developed.
I've found that a lot of people (across the tech skills landscape, from no hopers to professionals) all talk positively about Microsoft Edge. How much nicer it is to use over Chrome, how much quicker it is etc. Then Microsoft do something stupid like this to it.
Guys, you really don't have to do this shady shit. People are going to come to Edge because it's genuinely better than Chrome. But you do stuff like this then people will put up with Chrome's own shenanigans rather than trust a Microsoft product.
I've found that a lot of people (across the tech skills landscape, from no hopers to professionals) all talk positively about Microsoft Edge. How much nicer it is to use over Chrome, how much quicker it is etc.
You and I definitely have different view of what an I.T. "Professional" is. You are probably referring to someone who has all their MS certs, eat and drink everything MS.
A real Professional knows that there is essentially no difference between Edge, Google Chrome, Opera, Brave and other Chromium based browsers other than the GUI and some included features such as ad-blocking in Brave.
Edge seems faster because it pre-loads with Windows and is always running in the background so when you click on its icon it appears to launch instantly. When you apply hacks to disable Edge's pre-loading and always running in the background you'll see it's no faster than any other Chrome-based browser. A true I.T. Professional would know this.
There's a lot less slurping in the non-Microsoft / Google variants.
Unfortunately many of us in organisations that largely use Microsoft software have ended up having to move to Edge, mainly because it's the most commpatible browser when it comes to Microsoft cloudy services, Do I like this situation? No, but we were getting so many compatibility issues with Firefox that I was pushing into it eventually (having avoided Chrome itself for the whole of its existence).
If you are currently using Windows then right click on the taskbar. Select Task Manager. Select the Startup tab and look to see if Microsoft Edge is there and enabled. It has been put there without my permission and turned on. I have disabled it. Select the Edge and click the button in the lower right to disable auto start. You do not need this program using memory and cpu. Now click on processes and click on the name column scroll down to look for existing Edge processes. Select them and right click on 'end processes.'
I am a long time firefox user and do not wank this Edge crap running on my machine.
until MS [cough][cough] corrects that in the next set of patches.
They have a habit of fscking around with all sorts of stuff just to fsck those who don't want their level of 'do it my way or not at all"
It is a game of cat and mouse. What we need is a monster trap for MS that kills it off once and for all. The world would be a better place without their slurping (and take Google down at the same time)
I avoid Edge just as I did with IE like the plague! Do not like Chrome browser. Opting out and disabling to avoid data collecting is very similar to the buttons at intersections for the crosswalk signal. Few of them are even connected and if they are do nothing to alter the traffic lights sequence or frequency. "...the illusion of choice" - George Carlin
The update added at the end of this article seems to indicate that Microsoft is peddling the explanation that "if a user chose continuous import in the Edge first run experience on some other device, this state may be syncing incorrectly across their devices. This is not the intended feature experience." In addition to its cloying mis-use of "experience" that is typical of PR departments, this "explanation" is based on the premise that lots of people, including lots of IT professionals, affirmative chose to turn on a "continuous import" (i.e., wormhole to Redmond) function -- excuse me, 'feature,' not function. Are there really that many stupid people, or was this actually an opt-in by default, with a hard-to-find opt-out?
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