Forum Discussion
Dubious but willing to give it a shot.
- Howdy, 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.
vovchyk to me its that microsoft gives you options during the install and now lets you know that its happening instead of hiding it, in the lastest versions of windows you can disable presonalized ad tracking ID's duing the inital install and afterwards in the Settings app under privacy and even choose how much data you send to them for diagnostics, though there is no option for sending nothing which I wish they would add to calm the more parinoid individuals.
vovchyk I do not trust Google at all. For one, their stance when they where saying do no evil when they where doing just that. Their stances politically. Thier advocacy that makes them basically a propaganda wing of one of the political parties in the USA. Their idea that they are somehow better then others when they are not. Their hiding of the fact that the only real product they have is you.
No, I will trust MSFT far sooner then I will trust Google or any of their products. At least I know that MSFT is a company that is and always has been a company that does not hide the fact that it is out to make money. At least I can trust that.
Google and their attempts to control speach and the dissemination of information. Thier data collection efforts that now make them the largest intelligence agency in the world. And their gall to then use the phrase "do no evil".
No thank you.
RORWessels I don't disagree with you in principle and I'm not a Google defender per se. I just don't think that there's as wide an amount of difference between the two as one might think. Microsoft, I believe as an entity that targets the corporate world, tends to shy away from some of the hot-button issues that Google is unafraid to embrace. However, if it came down to it, MS will end up siding with Google in the areas that you mention.
I use Google services not because I like Google. It's because there is nobody who ties together such a wide range of useful services (top notch and unlimited photo management, cheap storage space, calendar, email, maps, music, etc) in a 100% integrated, 100% platform-independent way.
I don't like that they are the only company to do this correctly. Microsoft is the only company that has the heft to truly challenge them, but instead Microsoft has been turning more and more away from consumers, and more exclusively toward business enterprises. I hope Microsoft could provide that alternative ecosystem, but I am not convinced they think it's profitable to take on Google in those areas.
vovchyk for me, it's not the scope of data it's the depth and how they handle advertisement. Google is a bit too intimate for my tastes harvesting and storing vast quantities of the minutiae of my life. Looking at the data Google collected on me while I used Android and comparing it with the data Microsoft has on me, though I've used many more Microsoft services and hardware for far longer, there is a pretty significant difference in amount and depth. Another issue with that, and this pertains to advertisements too, is that Microsoft has always, in my experience, been much more transparent about what they're doing but Google obfuscated (though this has recently changed, too little too late for me) how, what, and how much purposefully. Which honestly, was probably unnecessary to hide, but it made me lose any trust with them. And when it comes to advertising, I don't care as long as I can turn targeted ads off, which was historically easier to do with Microsoft than Google, but that has also recently changed. No one should be making money off my body, what it likes and where it goes. If anyone were to make money off it, it should be me. Anything else is digital human trafficking, though I realize I'm probably alone on that front.
