Forum Discussion
RORWessels
Apr 08, 2019Brass Contributor
Dubious but willing to give it a shot.
I just loaded the latest Canary build for the "new" Edge browser. However, I do have some questions. What is MSFT doing to ensure that my browsing data is not being sent back to Google as I use thi...
- Apr 17, 2019Howdy, I work on the "No Exhaust" team at Edge.
To your question: The Edge team has audited all of the Chromium code for outbound network traffic and replaced calls to Google with Microsoft services, or removed the calls entirely. The Chromium code is amenable to such inspection because there are "Network Annotations" made for their network calls (so that IT admins, regulators, etc, can understand why network requests are being made and what is done with the data). My team has a variety of tools that we use for ongoing monitoring of changes going into Chromium that result in new network traffic.
Now, that's not to say your traffic *can't* go to Google depending on how you use your browser, of course. For instance, if you navigate to a Google site or property, your browser obviously will communicate with Google. If you configure your default search engine to be Google, your queries will go to Google. More subtley, if you enable Edge to use the Google Web Store for browser extensions, when your browser checks for updates to those extensions, it will do so by consulting with the Google web store.
_shellprompt1515
Apr 08, 2019Iron Contributor
There is indeed phone home code in base chromium.
Many of the advanced toggles in about:settings phone home to google, and I would not be surprised at all if there is even deeper telemetry stuff hiding.
However, some people have been able to https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium, and I highly doubt microsoft's finest would not be able to undo google's tracking.What I really want is for this new edge to be packaged as UWP, and have all the nice integration, themes, bells/whistles that come along with it. Dark theme and the acrylic styling (and the performance improvements) being among them