Microsoft investigates reports of Edge leaking all visited URLs to Bing
The problem is linked to 'follow creators' feature in the browser
Microsoft's Chromium-based Edge browser apparently has a sneaky way of exposing users' browsing history to Bing.
Concerns were first raised last week by a Reddit user who noticed that the latest version of Edge sends a request to bingapis.com with the full URL of almost every page that a user navigate to.
"Searching for references to this URL give very few results, no documentation on this feature at all," said hackermchackface, the Reddit user who first uncovered the issue.
It appears that the problem is linked to the "follow creators" feature in Edge, which allows users to follow their favourite content creators across the web.
Microsoft initially tested this feature last year before expanding its availability more widely in recent months.
According to Redditors, the feature was limited to a subset of social media sites, such as YouTube and Pinterest, in previous versions of Edge.
However, the current version appears to be sending every page visited by a user to Bing, rather than only pages related to content creators.
The fact that this feature is turned on by default raises concerns about privacy.
Rafael Rivera, a software engineer, explained to The Verge that the reason why all visited URLs are being sent to Bing is due to a poor implementation of the feature, which seems to be malfunctioning.
"Microsoft Edge now has a creator follow feature that is enabled by default," Rivera said.
"It appears the intent was to notify Bing when you're on certain pages, such as YouTube, The Verge, and Reddit. But it doesn't appear to be working correctly, instead sending nearly every domain you visit to Bing."
Microsoft has acknowledged these reports, saying they are aware of the issue and that they will take the necessary steps to address any concerns.
However, the company has yet to provide an explanation for why URLs are being sent to the bingapis.com service, or how Edge has been configured to send nearly all sites visited by users to Bing.
Users who are concerned about Edge leaking every page they visit to Bing can disable the "follow" feature to prevent this from happening.
To do this, they need to go to Settings > Privacy, Search, and Services > Services, and click the toggle switch for "Show suggestions to follow creators in Microsoft Edge."
By disabling this feature, you can ensure that your browsing history is not being shared with Bing.
It is worth noting that Edge is not the only browser that has experienced privacy or security issues recently.
Just this month, Google had to release an emergency update for Chrome to fix a zero-day vulnerability exploited in attacks since the start of the year.
"Google is aware that an exploit for CVE-2023-2033 exists in the wild," Google said in a security advisory.
Days later, the search giant released a Chrome update to fix the second zero-day vulnerability found to be exploited in attacks.