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Microsoft Urging Safari Users To Use Bing

Posted by samzenpus on from the you-tried-the-rest-now-try-the-best dept.

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."

1 of 266 comments (clear)

  1. 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.