Microsoft’s Edge browser is leaking all of the websites you visit to the Bing API website, a new report claimed. First spotted by a Reddit user last week, the latest version of Microsoft Edge has been sending all visited URLs to bingapis.com.
“Searching for references to this URL give very few results, no documentation on this feature at all,” said hackermchackface, the Reddit user who first discovered the issue.
When users visit a website on Microsoft Edge, that visited data is sent to Bing for almost all URLs. This tracking doesn’t have any malicious issues but it is enabled by default.
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According to The Verge (via a software engineer):
“Microsoft first started testing this new creator follow feature in Edge last year before rolling it out more broadly in recent months. It’s designed to let you follow your favorite content creators on YouTube and across the web. If you disable the feature, URLs are no longer sent to bingapis.com.”
As a part of that feature, Edge sends that URL to the Bing API. The engineer, Rafael Rivera, explains to The Verge, “it doesn’t appear to be working correctly, instead sending nearly every domain you visit to Bing.”
According to Caitlin Roulston, director of communications at Microsoft, the company is aware of these reports and that the company will take appropriate action to address any issues.
In the meantime, you can turn off the “follow” feature to stop tracking your URLs. You can do this by heading to Settings, selecting Privacy, Search, and Services, and tap on Services, and now clicking on the toggle off “Show suggestions to follow creators in Microsoft Edge.”
