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Edge sends full URLs of pages visited to Microsoft

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Re: Edge sends full URLs of pages visited to Microsoft

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The good part of Microsoft is the division responsible for languages, compilers and cloud. Putting their telemetry in your compiled binaries is ... real good? Marketing is the only thing that changed.

Yes. I have absolutely no problem with the way that works. It’s clearly spelled out how it works and how it’s configured. Seems few who actually use these tools have problems with this...

This is another lie. During the install process Windows 10 pretends to give the option to disable "telemetry".

The you visit the control panel and find that something like 50 "telemetry" options are still enabled.

This is deceitful and evil.

Re: Edge sends full URLs of pages visited to Microsoft

#42
post #40

Edge is the number one browser in the world for installing chrome.

Doesn't Chrome send your entire browsing history to Google as well? Edit: I thought this was a well know fact and if it isn't I might have been to harsh about Google and Chrome. Edit 2: Thinking about it and searching a bit I conclude that IIRC Google at least used to have access to your browsing history as part of syncing it unencrypted.

I would love to see a source for this.

Re: Edge sends full URLs of pages visited to Microsoft

#43
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, this is not happening locally, against bloom filters or something?

There is a first step which uses bloom filters, and if the filter gives a result, it is hashed and the hash is sent to the google service to double-check. That being said, a four byte / 32 bit hash is enough to almost uniquely identify a website. There number of 32 bit numbers and websites is roughly the same order of magnitude. It's a problem without a good solution because if you create many collisions then you als…

>That being said, a four byte / 32 bit hash is enough to almost uniquely identify a website. There number of 32 bit numbers and websites is roughly the same order of magnitude.

Why not send less bits (eg. 24 bit) of the hash?

Re: Edge sends full URLs of pages visited to Microsoft

#44
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, this is not happening locally, against bloom filters or something?

There is a first step which uses bloom filters, and if the filter gives a result, it is hashed and the hash is sent to the google service to double-check. That being said, a four byte / 32 bit hash is enough to almost uniquely identify a website. There number of 32 bit numbers and websites is roughly the same order of magnitude. It's a problem without a good solution because if you create many collisions then you als…

Why can’t the browser request the mapping of the hash to the malicious website that is known and then check if that mapping is indeed what it is seeing?

Re: Edge sends full URLs of pages visited to Microsoft

#45
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other browsers use a _truncated_ hash. Easy enough to match to a known list of bad sites, but exceptionally difficult to reverse engineer a list of sites the user has visited.

Those hashes have to be essentially unique to prevent blocking good sites erroneous;y, and as such are easily associated to actual sites when you’re the scale of MS or Google.

Not if there's an other layer of verification locally. Then you can allow a few false positives with the hash on the remote and they'll get discarded when the full hash is compared locally. That being said 32bits of information seems like quite a lot and can probably used to match the original URL fairly accurately.

Re: Edge sends full URLs of pages visited to Microsoft

#46
post #40

Edge is the number one browser in the world for installing chrome.

Doesn't Chrome send your entire browsing history to Google as well? Edit: I thought this was a well know fact and if it isn't I might have been to harsh about Google and Chrome. Edit 2: Thinking about it and searching a bit I conclude that IIRC Google at least used to have access to your browsing history as part of syncing it unencrypted.

Everything you type into the address bar gets considered for possible completion, right? And part of that quite possibly entails sending it off to Google servers which take a stab at finding completions for it. Your claim seems plausible at least.

Re: Edge sends full URLs of pages visited to Microsoft

#47
post #40

Edge is the number one browser in the world for installing chrome.

Doesn't Chrome send your entire browsing history to Google as well? Edit: I thought this was a well know fact and if it isn't I might have been to harsh about Google and Chrome. Edit 2: Thinking about it and searching a bit I conclude that IIRC Google at least used to have access to your browsing history as part of syncing it unencrypted.

If you are logged into Chrome your history is synchronized across platforms, tied to your Google account. Same as with Firefox Sync. Not sure about behavior when not logged in, or when incognito.

Re: Edge sends full URLs of pages visited to Microsoft

#48
post #40

Edge is the number one browser in the world for installing chrome.

Doesn't Chrome send your entire browsing history to Google as well? Edit: I thought this was a well know fact and if it isn't I might have been to harsh about Google and Chrome. Edit 2: Thinking about it and searching a bit I conclude that IIRC Google at least used to have access to your browsing history as part of syncing it unencrypted.

If you sign in it syncs history across devices, so I assume it does. Although it would technically be possible that they encrypt it using a key Google doesn't have, I wouldn't assume they implemented that.

Re: Edge sends full URLs of pages visited to Microsoft

#50
post #42
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't Chrome send your entire browsing history to Google as well? Edit: I thought this was a well know fact and if it isn't I might have been to harsh about Google and Chrome. Edit 2: Thinking about it and searching a bit I conclude that IIRC Google at least used to have access to your browsing history as part of syncing it unencrypted.

I would love to see a source for this.

It is not so easy to do this MITM trick with Chrome, it has Google certs pinned down.

"For the transparent proxy to work, it needs .google.com to be added to the URL whitelist to allow all traffic to .google.com. This configuration is not supported because of Chrome security features that are in place, and we recommend that you avoid the use of transparent proxies." https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/3504942?hl=en

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