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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.
So either way, you're still getting your results from Google.
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
Isn't this like Ford telling Toyota owners to buy a new Ford because a Chevron tanker ran aground?
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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
Google was acting like Microsoft and as a result MS expects people to use a Microsoft product instead?
For this reason I avoid Bing like the plague and use IE for what it was meant for: a download tool for a real browser.
Safari Users. We could be talking as many as 2 dozen people here.
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.
startpage is way better for privacy and much better results since it uses google. why the hell do people keep using DuckDuckGo?
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.
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.
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.
That linked-to blog is rather full of shit.
I avoid using Google for searching 99% of the time, block AdSense, Google Analytics, and usually Google APIs, but this is over the top:
Just bullshit. They are, if anything overly eager to have content pulled based upon loose matches by copyright bots.
Some of that copyrighted content is posted by the rights holders as advertising too.
Then there's this steaming turd:
Criminally insane? Greedy maybe, but the only one criminally insane is the anonymous blogger that posted this crap.
Of course it isn't.
Oh really? I don't trust them, but they've been remarkably non-evil considering the amount of power they wield.
Agreed.
They push for an open internet with open standards where ever they can; they could push closed standards but don't -- that's relatively noble, for a corporate entity.
Same with all ad-based content.
I don't and help others block their trackers and use other search engines.
They are the lesser of 5 evils (Apple, MS, Oracle, FaceBook, Google). I fear that someday they could become enormously evil, but for now the blogger is a hyperventilating, hyperbolic douche.
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.
I have just tried startpage and it is very good. It seems to be run by ixquick, which seems good too
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.
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."
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
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.
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.'"
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.