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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."

5 of 266 comments (clear)

  1. Trust Microsoft. No, really. by Tough+Love · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  2. Re:DuckDuckGo by tepples · · Score: 4, Informative

    Thank you for the suggestion. Bing's app doesn't appear to work on Android tablets (which appears intentional), but DuckDuckGo's app works fine on my Nexus 7.

  3. Things can be relative by SuperKendall · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  4. MS DID get caught, sniffing peoples google search by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  5. Re:MS DID get caught, sniffing peoples google sear by cbhacking · · Score: 4, Informative

    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...