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Microsoft Urging Safari Users To Use Bing
New submitter SquarePixel writes "Microsoft is urging Safari users to switch to Bing after Google was fined $22.5 million for violating Safari privacy settings. 'Microsoft is keen to make sure that no-one forgets this, let alone Safari users, and the page summarizes the events that took place.' It tells users how Google promised not to track Safari users, but tracked them without their permission and used this data to serve them advertisement. Lastly, it tells how Google was fined $22.5 million for this and suggests users to try the more privacy oriented Bing search engine."
Yeah, they haven't gotten caught yet
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
DuckDuckGo's entire advertising strategy is based off of privacy.
Google breaching user privacy and Microsoft advocating privacy
Bing, that integrates with Facebook, who are the champions of privacy, of course.
They should just use startpage. Its still google searches just without being tracked by google.
DuckDuckGo would be a safer bet... I personally have been using it for about 3 months and haven't felt the need to go back to Google.
MS should just quite, the faster the die the better. Read this Ballmer, NO ONE TRUSTS MS.
People are more inclined to trust facebook and apple, than they ever would MS.
No, DuckDuckGo's entire strategy is based off advertising privacy. You are still the product, being sold.
So either way, you're still getting your results from Google.
Pot - Kettle - Black.
After all, Microsoft is the one technology company that has demonstrated a consistently superior level of trustworthiness and sound ethics. Right?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Wow.. this is definitely news. A competitor of MS made a mistake, and they're attempting to gain an advantage from it.
It's like... they're competing or something.
More stories like this /.
This is groundbreaking stuff
Is it November already?
Lesser of two evils, indeed.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Oh wait, they're serious. Allow me to laugh harder.
Isn't this like Ford telling Toyota owners to buy a new Ford because a Chevron tanker ran aground?
iRepairIT - iPhone, Mac, & PC Repair
Just because Google does stupid shit does not mean Microsoft does not also deserve to be called out for doing stupid shit.
But we can note when Google is worse.
Google's G+ integration includes G+ results being promoted in the search stream.
Microsoft's Facebook integration does not alter your search results.
And G+ is sucking a lot more of your personal information (including search habits) into Google. At least with Microsoft there remains some division between what Facebook gets and what Microsoft gets.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
your own search engine spider to heck with big business idiots chunking me ads....
Google was acting like Microsoft and as a result MS expects people to use a Microsoft product instead?
Google is more evil than Microsoft ever was.
I don't use Safari, but I'm really sick of Microsoft always trying to stuff Bing! down my throat.
I don't like it and I will never use it.
Like this one act suddenly makes Google less trustworthy then Microsoft. Even if Microsoft ended all of the bullshit, it would take 20 years of being squeaky clean for me to truth them, (I am, for some reason, a little jaded with them)...
I'm hoping they will not modify current notifications in a bad way. current ones are useful for regular desktop use. I'm sure they're not as useful for FB, twitter announces and that sort of crap and it seems to be what they want to fix.
The stuff nerds like me don't give a rat's ass about.
Safari Users. We could be talking as many as 2 dozen people here.
Then you no longer have real privacy.
Disclaimer: I do indeed have a smartphone. I'm just not kidding myself.
When China told Google to censor or get out, they got out - evacuating to Taiwan.
Eric Schmidt, the Chairman and CEO at the time was for pursuing the business opportunity through minimizing the damage. Larry Page was ambivalent. That day Sergey Brin became Google's moral compass and said something like: "Not just no, but Fuck no. My dad was a Russian dissident and came to America to avoid being sent to a Gulag for speaking his mind. If you do this not only will I take my share and leave, but I'll use it to do my best to defeat the monster you've become."
There was a big fight and Eric Schmidt gave up the CEO spot and his role as the world's best-paid babysitter. Larry Page took it (Sergey didn't want it). And Google moved out of China, abandoning the world's biggest growth market until it's ready to accept at least the human right of free speech. But the question about where Google stood on free speech was forever closed. That issue at least is resolved.
Bing and Yahoo crowed their triumph that day, that they had bested their adversary on at least one field - and an important one. For all of me this was one battle they needed to lose.
Recently there was press about some unnamed person from the White House asking YouTube to check a controversial video to see if it violated their terms of service. The reply: "No, it doesn't - thanks for asking." The implied unofficial implication was that it would be convenient if the video violated the terms. Certainly this didn't come from the President directly as he taught Constitutional Law, so it was a minor official inquiry that by some other company would have been taken as an opportunity to seek some advantage. But Google would have none of that. They don't do that. If pressed (they weren't pressed) the answer would certainly have been "not just no, but Fuck No! We don't do that." America doesn't have anything like the ability to enforce cooperation that China does, and if it happened to gain that power Google would just leave the US too now because organizationally the "free speech" question is completely and forever settled.
For all that some would paint Google as evil, maybe Google is in some aspect preserving our moral compass for when we regain our sanity and come to understand again what's really important. Until then I admire their determination to retain their moral compass and do the right thing.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Microsoft are now the white-hat privacy advocates?
And what of Ixquick/Startpage?
That I'm right, and you don't like it, doesn't mean I'm a troll.
POS wanabee crap
Is it faster then others...?
If you're not looking for something only two people and their dogs care about, Wikipedia can provide enough information to get you up to speed. Even with the deletionists, trolls, and shills, I find Wikipedia to be more relevant, if not more accurate, than running a typical Google search which would point to a Wikipedia article anyway.
The reference/links section at the end of an article is often more valuable than the article itself, which is how I use Wikipedia as a "search" engine. Like any large web site, Wikipedia has a site search feature, which, as far as I can tell, has not been outsourced to the two or three search giants. The major browsers can also be configured to use Wikipedia as a search engine.
Of course what we really need is a true crowd-sourced search engine that isn't controlled by a single humongous corporation. But there's already more information in Wikipedia than when Google started indexing the web in the late 1990s. This trove of information can serve as the seed.
But MS *DID* get caught. Remember the IE Toolbar, it watched users Google searches, and sent the results and the queries back to Microsoft, where Microsoft use it to improve (i.e. copy) for their own search results?
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/google-to-microsoft-search-gotcha/
Google added some fake searches, entered those into IE and it promptly sent that data back to Microsoft HQ where they put it in the Bing results.
Not only that, they denied it, then it turned out they'd denied only the 'copying part', then they claimed it was anonymous data and thus not snooping (it isn't they get the toolbar id, and search data often has addresses, medical conditions and names in it).
So yeh, they got caught. The only bizarre thing is why they weren't prosecuted. I think we're all kind of wary of Microsoft now, if you're using Microsoft products, more fool you.
DuckDuckGo is what I use now.
yay great my search engine has a animated background, and shows me at least one page of kittens for an image search, just what I wanted when I pay out the ass per byte
But Bing also offers too much privacy to search results that I might be interested in.
In my first scan of the headline I thought it said "Microsoft Urging Safari Users To Use Bling"... which makes just about as much sense.
https://www.bing.com/
How can anyone consider them serious with this attitude to https?
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm
look what i found in my servers logs trying to peek in even with a robots.txt forbidding crap like that..... .... .....if corporations do not want to respect fundamentals of the net then fook them....
gee guess they want to see what i r has do they
now ill do up a block on my server
SIDES i have my own search engine....and its private....
Microsoft sells Software, Google sells You.
I tried that blind comparison test that Microsoft set up between Google and Bing, just because I am a nerd who can appreciate that he may be prejudiced and wanted to actually do a test for himself. I still ended up choosing what I later discovered were Google's results as my preferred ones for 3 out of the 5 test searches. Scoring 2-for-5 was not enough to get me to switch to Bing, of course, but it was enough to get me to appreciate the service more.
The Safari issue sucks, of course, and I am a Safari user on my Mac at home (though I hate it on Windows), but it won't be a deciding factor for me.
Microsoft is leveraging this to claim we shouldn't *directly* trust Google, but as part of Bing's own privacy statement, we are expected to accept *indirect* use of "Web Beacons" from Google Analytics.[1]
If what Google did is so horrific that we should stop using Google, then shouldn't Microsoft stop using Google in relation to Bing as well?
It seems like even the people that write the Bing privacy statement aren't willing to go as far as drinking the Microsoft kool-aid.
[1] http://www.microsoft.com/privacystatement/en-us/bing/default.aspx#
I've been using ddg.gg instead of either of the search engines created by those two soulless people-hating corporate monstrosities.
Wow, you really are an idiot. The toolbar installer explained that it could send your searches to Microsoft in order to improve results. It was obviously (except, oddly, to Google's completely brilliant and utterly unbiased engineers) a feature you enabled if you wanted to guide Bing towards better (from your perspective) search results. Google engineers deliberately enabled this behavior, then poisoned the results with nonsense searches that *had* no legit results, so the only info Bing had on those queries were the poisoned values. They then claimed that the fact that Microsoft was using the poisoned values that Google had deliberatesly sent them meant that Microsoft was "copying" Google.
A number of... individuals... such as yourself not only believed Google's absurd bullshit, they kept on repeating it long after Google themselves retreated when they realized their attempt to smear a competitor was having a counterproductive effect.
Also, DuckDuckGo uses Bing (and not in a "Bing copies Google results!!1!" sense, but as in some of its searches are actually directly executed through Bing), among other search engines. So, guess what, you're using Microsoft products. Who's the fool, again?
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
what is the difference between what Bing did and what google does?
http://www.benedelman.org/news/012610-1.html
Run the Google Toolbar, and it’s strikingly easy to activate “Enhanced Features” -- transmitting to Google the full URL of every page-view, including searches at competing search engines.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/187670/Google_Toolbar_Tracks_You_Even_After_Being_Disabled.html
Let me rephrase what happened in reality: A google employee noticed that the bing toolbar reports search terms back to bing -- just like the google toolbar does.. and Google decided score some easy points, and make Bing look like a copycat.
First, nowhere on that page does Microsoft pledge not to track you. Second, Microsoft has a vested interest in shooting everyone who honors DNT in the head so that they can't get any more revenue by being better at analytics than Microsoft. Third, Microsoft sites fail to honor DNT, even if you are dumb and use IE9. Fourth, the DNT standard was written such that DNT was opt-in, not opt-out, and Microsoft is failing to implement the standard with IE9.
So the business model is:
(1) Ruin every honest web sites analytics by DNT-by-default in IE9
(2) Ignore the DNT sent by IE9 and other browsers when doing their own analytics
(3) Become the sole source of qualified targeted advertising as a result
(4) Profit!
There isn't even a "???" step in there.
And yet he gets modded up by a bunch of other idiots. Go figure.
If you just went to google.com and typed in a search, the IE toolbar wouldnt report things back to bing. It is only if you used the search box of the toolbar that this was happening.
The difference between the IE toolbar and the Google toolbar is that the google toolbar cannot be configured to use any search engine other than google.
Now, next time be totally honest about what was happening. I dont think its too hard to do that. Microsoft still looks bad when being honest.. no need to exaggerate.
"His name was James Damore."
Wait, what? Bing toolbar sniffing Google searches and Google results is not MS copying Google? I mean, seriously, don't you see the difference between them analyzin Bing queries and which results users prefer and them analyzing Google searches and copying results they couldn't have indexed at all before (as those were synthetic pages for synthetic terms not even appearing on those pages)?
Sorry, MS, but Google will have to engage in at least a decade of evilness before they are even in the same league as you.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
You can visualize that with the Firefox plugin Collusion
As we all know, Bing uses Google for searching: http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-our-search-results-62914
The patent attack unleashed by Apple against the most important Android manufacturers and indirectly against Android itself could benefit M$ , eventually. If manufactured get pissed against Google because of its patent vulnerabilities they could switch to windows 8 that is far more safe from this standpoint (M$ and Apple have cross licensing agreements). This "Bing" story is another element that make me think about at some secret agreement between the two most evil companies in the IT.
Microsoft is sending searches done on GOOGLE to Microsoft, and results chosen from the GOOGLE search to Microsoft.
Google sends the searches on Google toolbar to Google. You know the bar that's for searching GOOGLE!
If I talk to you, I'm not spying on the conversation, I'm PART OF THE CONVERSATION. What Microsoft did was to spy on its users GOOGLE searches, which were none of their business.
So the medical queries you searched Google for were spied on by Microsoft, the addressed you searched for on Google were spied on and sent to Microsoft, the secret perversions you searched for on Google were spied on by Microsoft and sent to Microsoft.
If you entered a query intended for Google, Microsoft spied on the query, it then watched the site you visited. They then added that site as a result for that query.
So Google noticed a misspelling for a rare medical term that had no Bing result, suddenly had a Bing result, a single result, BUT THE SPELLING WAS NOT CORRECTED. So they got the search from the intercepted data. They also only had the top result, the one someone had chosen, again that's telling. It tells you that they also tracked the user's response to the search.
So your medical queries intended for Google were sent to Microsoft, as was the sites you visited as a result of the query.
Searches are not anonymous information, this was shown when AOL released search results and people were tracked down from it. Those searches were not for Microsoft yet they intercepted them, they went on to intercept the result you chose.
Yet AOL paid a fine and Microsoft? Nothing! They issued a few deceptive non-denials and were let off.
Go ahead, use Bing, just make sure you're using chrome cause IE is still unsafe
what is the difference between what Bing did and what google does?
The difference is that Microsoft has spying technology built right into the browser, it's called compatibility view updates, and their search suggestion system. With Google you have to choose to be tracked.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yup. Even DDG seems to know this, as they provide links to other search engines with their results. DDG is now even advertising on a rather shocking website, but the point is probably Moot.
We know they spied on the resulting URLs because they included the URL the user chose as the search result in Bing. You can pretend they didn't spy on the search queries of Google directly, well perhaps they could use the following URL to improve their search results:
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=microsoft%27s+moral+compass
You can see that they certainly DID spy on searches made on Google and other search engines. Not just in the toolbar.
I read another Microsoft fluffer's comment below claiming they had permission from the user, no they didn't. Their agreement for that feature said they'd send anonymous usage data for the toolbar, the data they grabbed was not anonymous and not restricted to toolbar usage.
What they did was and is a criminal offense in many countries, yet the blusters and misdirection was enough to save them.
The problem with switching to Bing is that you trade in a good search engine for yet another Microsoft LOC. If I search the same string on Google, Yahoo and Bing, in 100% of all cases Bing will return of most irrelevant search items, Yahoo will return the second most irrelevant and Google actually give me what I want, so why would any web user want to switch, I'm not just going to give up producitively because Microsoft seems to think they developed another good program ( they have yet to make 1 ).
To prove my point: If I search: hydrometers and arduino
Google:
Digital Hydrometer - Page 7 - Home Brew Forums
Battery Hydrometer Sensor? - Arduino
How to Make a Hydrometer | eHow.com
Those are good results! helpful and useful.
Yahoo
Arduino Forum - Moisture meter input
Measuring SG using capacitance...Arduino brewing
Digital Hydrometer - Home Brew Forums - HomeBrewTalk.com - Beer, Wine
Again not bad but not as good as Google
Bing
Density/Specific Gravity sensing - Arduino Forum
Arduino Wifi - Microcontroller Forum Tracker
Easiest Wifi module/shield to interface with Arduino Fio
Okay so proof! Bing showing it's complete and total fail at trying to search the world wide web, good job Microsoft! I'll switch as soon as I'm dead.
... uses Safari anyway?
Oblivion Awaits
At first, Bing's app was exclusive to Verizon. It has since been opened to more phones but not apparently to Android tablets.
Microsoft is urging... users to switch to Bing
In other news, water is wet!
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
A large company sees what they perceive as a potential weakness or leverage point in a competitor's product and throws some marketing dollars around to try and take advantage of it.
Will the horrors never cease...
https://www.duckduckgo.com/ - problem solved.
"Safari has a bug that allowed Google to track users who had tracking disabled."
Use Duck Duck GO! SSL, instead of Bing. That does bring up a question I've been pondering for a while though. With all the tech Apple has, with all the patents they've lucked into or bought, etc, I'm really surprised they haven't launched their own search engine, which I guess would have to be called "iLook".
I had a report of problems with a web sites from users who may or may not have been using IE9. So, I fired up my Windows 7 VM to check and it was still running IE8. What? No problem. That is why I installed it this VM. I just searched for "ie9" in my IE8 browser. Bing couldn't find a download link for IE9. It was Google's top hit.
With Google you have to choose to be tracked.
Huh?.
You are very gollible if you think the founders didn't start google so they could get rich. Welcome to capitalism where nobody does anything for free.
I did this right now in IE 7 - top link is the home page for IE, with a big orange "download" button. No way Bing can't find a download link.
With google you have to knowingly choose not to be tracked. You are tracked by default.
With Google you have to choose to be tracked.
It's true that google analytics will track you across sites if you don't block them, and although that's easy to do you shouldn't have to. But I'm talking about IE having spying by default, and coming with your OS.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It all comes down to trust. Who do I trust?
You couldn't pay me to use a Microsoft service of any kind. I overwrote my last Microsoft partition at the stroke of midnight, January 1, 2000. My computer life has been so much more aggravation free since.
According to Microsoft's own research, Google gives you results page of higher quality. They even created the website "bingiton.com", apparently available only in USA, where people vote for either Bing or Google after viewing result pages of both. Here is a good short story about why Google is still better: http://kirsanov.net/post/2012/09/11/Bing-or-Not.aspx
Okay then paid for by Microsoft spin doctor. Microsofts toolbar looked at google's search results and links that were clicked on in google. This isn't Microsoft's tool bar looking at bing searches, which is how the feature was loosely presented to users as wanting to do. It is violating the user trust by reading activities from any other arbitrary website and reporting those back to Microsoft. Google didn't retreat at all because the end result was Microsoft cut it out.
Google is still the only search engine I've tried that actually gives useful results. Microsoft can say all they like about Google, some of it might even be true (not that I'd necessarily trust Microsoft any more than Google, which I don't completely trust either), but they can't claim to have actually decent search results on things, which Google can. (Which means, sadly, neither can duckduckgo, which has a fantastic UI and which I trust far more to not be evil... but which uses bing's search results, which as previously mentioned, suck.)