Introducing Microsoft Edge Secure Network
Today, we're excited to share that we have kicked off experiments for Microsoft Edge Secure Network in the Canary channel of Microsoft Edge. We are opening this preview to a small audience to get initial feedback and recommendations so we can offer the best in-browser Secure Network experience. What does Secure Network do? With Edge Secure Network, you can connect to public Wi-Fi at coffee shops, airports, restaurants, hotels, & other venues, complete transactions, and shop online, all with the improved privacy and security that gives you the peace of mind you deserve. Secure Network helps you protect your information by masking your device's IP address, encrypting your data, and routing it through a secure network (powered by Cloudflare) to a server that is geographically co-located so it’s harder for malicious actors to see your true location and what you’re doing. It also prevents your internet service provider from collecting your browsing data, like details about which websites you visit, and helps prevent online entities from using your IP address for profiling and sending you targeted ads. As part of our first experiment, we’re giving everyone who tries this out a small amount of free Secure Network bandwidth to use however they see fit. For some activities like streaming videos, this allotment may be used significantly quicker than other activities like shopping and browsing the web. We encourage you to use the built-in controls to enable and disable the Secure Network and use this data however it best suits your needs and send us feedback about how Secure Network works for you. See our support page for more details. We will be diligently reviewing feedback as we over the coming weeks, so keep an eye out for Edge Secure Network and help us create the best experience possible! How it Works Whenever Secure Network is connected, your browsing traffic will be encrypted and routed through our service’s servers and then to its final destination. This helps ensure that your personal data will be more secure no matter what complicated route your browsing data takes or how many parties are involved in providing the content inside your favorite web page. Geo Location and Regions A lot of web technology relies on trying to intelligently provide results based on where you are located. We want to ensure that the web still works as you expect it to so when you search for a nearby restaurant or local movie showtimes, you can still get relevant results. We also want to help protect you as an individual, so you’re not personally associated with those results just by browsing the web. We’ve partnered with Cloudflare to help ensure that if VPNs are allowed in your region, wherever you connect to the Secure Network service, you will connect to a local data center and the IP address your browsing data flows through will be geographically similar to your actual region. However, websites will not see your individual network address, keeping your browsing disassociated from you while still allowing the internet to ‘just work’ as you expect. Microsoft Account and Data Collection During this preview phase Secure Network requires users to be signed into the browser with their Microsoft account. Sign-in is used solely to authenticate to the service and ensure you’re to receive more free data during the current period. No data about your user identity or account is sent over the Secure Network connection as part of this service. Additionally, limited diagnostic data may be ephemerally present on our partner’s servers for no more than 25 hours to help troubleshoot connection and performance issues, but is not persisted or directly associated with any given user. See our privacy promise and Cloudflare privacy notice for even more details. Send Us Feedback Be on the lookout for Secure Network as we expand our testing. We look forward to discovering how you would like to use Secure Network to protect your data, what works well, and what we can improve. Let us know on the shield icon flyout by giving us a quick thumbs up or down or use the in-browser feedback icon to send us more detailed feedback. Alt + Shift + I – Shortcut to send feedback As always, thanks for being a part of this journey towards a more private and secure web! Brandon Maslen, Principal Software Engineer Kelda Anderson, Product Manager
