| Title | Microsoft Edge Shares Privacy-Busting Telemetry, Research Alleges | |
| Date | Tuesday March 17 2020, @07:06PM | |
| Author | martyb | |
| Topic | ||
| from the What-about-lynx? dept. | ||
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Microsoft Edge is one of the least private web browsers — even more so than other popular browsers like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox — according to academic researchers.
According to the analysis, from Douglas Leith with the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College in Ireland, Edge sends privacy-invasive telemetry to Microsoft’s back-end servers — including “persistent” device identifiers and URLs typed into browsing pages.
Leith measured the connections made by six browsers to back-end services during web browsing sessions. From these measurements, he deduced Brave Browser to be the most private, with Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari coming in as part of a less-secure second group. In the third, least private group was Microsoft Edge and Russian web browser Yandex Browser. Internet Explorer wasn’t included in the research since it is largely confined to legacy devices.
“The results of this study have prompted discussions, which are ongoing, of browser changes including allowing users to opt-out of search auto-complete on first startup plus a number of browser specific changes,” said Leith, in research released last week. “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.”
[...] “When the same identifier is used across multiple transmissions it allows these transmissions to be tied together across time,” he explained. “While linking data to a browser instance does not explicitly reveal the user’s real-world identity, many studies have shown that location data linked over time can be used to de-anonymize [users].”
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printed from SoylentNews, Microsoft Edge Shares Privacy-Busting Telemetry, Research Alleges on 2024-04-18 14:01:22