Information released this week reveals that the Microsoft Edge browser is leaking user search data to the company’s own Bing search engine. This was discovered by Reddit users who spotted the issue last week by noting the URLs accessed were being sent to the search engine API.
According to a community user, “Searching for references to this URL gives very few results, no documentation on this resource”, indicating that tracking may have started without users’ consent. In an interview with The Verge, software engineer Rafael Rivera commented on this sharing of browser.
For Rivera, this happens due to a function still under development and that will be officially implemented in Edge only in future updates. “Microsoft Edge now has a creator tracking feature that is enabled by default,” he said.
Apparently, the purpose of the tool is to notify Bing as soon as the user accesses a certain website, such as YouTube, for example. However, some flaw in the feature causes almost all accessed sites to be mistakenly sent to Bing even without permission.
The developer has not yet taken a position on the subject, so there is no official information. The guidance is that users disable the “Follow this creator” option in Edge settings until the flaw is fixed.
