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 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.