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Microsoft Says IE8 Phoning Home Is "Pretty Innocuous"
CWmike writes "Microsoft has defended the IE8 tool that suggests sites based on URLs typed into its address bar, saying that the browser 'phones home' only a limited amount of information to Microsoft and that the company discards all user IP addresses almost immediately. Company managers also contrasted IE8 Beta 2's 'Suggested Sites' feature with the 'Suggest' feature used by Google Chrome, saying that Microsoft's requires the user's explicit permission before it's used. They did acknowledge a bug that prevents the request from reappearing when users reinstall the browser. Cyra Richardson, a Microsoft principal program manager on the IE team, said: 'Suggested Sites is connected to the browser's history, and it's not looking at each of the keystrokes. IE only captures the URL as it is navigated [to], when that URL goes into your history.' Nor does Suggested Sites log and transmit cookies to Microsoft's servers, as does Google Suggest, Richardson said. 'The data we log is actually pretty innocuous.'"
Google bought youtube and has shown me videos related to ones I watched about a month after they bought them. Their horrible privacy standards need to be complained about a little louder. I think a big spyware browser that follows you around and reports back where you go is where we should draw the line. However, Microsoft doesn't seem to understand that just because google's browser is worse, that doesn't mean IE8 is okay.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Microsoft and Google should just publish the exact data exchange protocol used by their respective "smart search" features -- and keeps those documentations up to date, of course.
The protocols are gonna get out, anyway -- someone will snoop them out soon enough. Better have an official documentation than endless wild rumors, and the whole thing would hardly cost any resources.
Holy Jesus man, have you even been to any other web forum? Compared to the normal signal-to-noise ratio on the internet, Slashdot (if you browse at +3 or +4) is a cut or three above just about anything else, and almost exclusively so for unmoderated forums. But yeah, other than that, you hit the "groupthink" idea right on, except for that a lot of people, lately, have been getting annoyed at google's "collect data for everything" policy, among other things.
After all most users who pirate Microsoft products discard most of them almost immediately.
Yeah that works doesn't it? If you violate someone's right's it's not okay just because you do it for a short time! Cuts both ways.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
You trust Google more than Microsoft when it comes to your privacy? Now Microsoft has a pretty long history in the pc world. Can you cite me any truly egregious privacy violations commited by Microsoft, well besides their lack of focus on secutrity.
I think on the privacy front Microsoft has the better record, and to me Google is starting to look like the CiC
would be for browsers to have auto correction feature in the address bar. I've typed a comma many times into the bar by accident and no website uses them but why does the browser insist on searching first before telling me the address is incorrect. It should note the error and replace it with the full stop.
Jonathanjk.com
Just because they throw out the original IP Address, doesn't mean they can't identify you on subsequent visits. Let's say they make a hash of your IP Address, combined with your ISP, which could be obtained based on your IP address. This would probably make the hashes mostly unique, or even completely unique if the key in the database was Hash(IPAddress), ServiceProviderID. They could throw out your IP address, and nobody would be able to figure out your IP based on their data, but they'd still be able to uniquely identify you.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Except we know Google will store and OWN all the data. And, if it comes from someone criticizing the Chinese government, it will turn over said data to said government.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.