Edge might be sending every URL you visit to Bing’s API by mistake: Microsoft responds

What you need to know

• Microsoft Edge contains a feature intended to help suggest content from your favorite creators, enabled by default.
• Usually designed to send telemetry data of specific websites related to the content back to a Bing API, it appears to be erroneously sending every URL visited by some users.
• The flag can be disabled in the privacy settings for Microsoft Edge as a recommended solution until an official patch is applied.

In what could be a particularly embarrassing blunder, it seems that Microsoft’s Edge browser (opens in new tab) might accidentally be sending a full report of every user-visited URL to its Bing API, excluding only a selection of pages from a filtered list that anyone can view (opens in new tab). Noticing the bizarre behavior, an initial post on Reddit (opens in new tab) triggered an independent investigation by the community and led to Microsoft offering its response to The Verge (opens in new tab). It’s all linked to an unassuming toggle deep in its privacy settings related to YouTube creators that’s gone awry.

The intention is to help curate creator content based on websites explicitly linked to that topic and person, but it has generally gone unnoticed by casual users. Rather than sending the correct information to its API, Bing (opens in new tab)has erroneously sent back almost every URL you visit to its servers. Naturally, this sparks privacy concerns for anyone using Microsoft Edge, but it’s easy enough to disable the faulty feature.

1. In Microsoft Edge, open the Settings menu via the three dots in the top right.
2. Click Privacy, search, and services from the left-side menu.
3. Scroll to the bottom and disable ‘Show suggestions to follow creators.‘