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Two months after Edge leaked every URL of every website that you visited to Microsoft, Edge now sends image URLs to Microsoft
in a (still) experimental feature to a new feature, Microsoft claims to improve the images ("super resolution").
Keywords is the "enhance image" function.
Web Browsers are one of the most crucial pieces of software you run on a daily basis. You use them to access critical services, you log in to your bank, you file your taxes. Your password manager is in your browser.
A web browser is a piece of software that every user needs to be able to trust. Trust is a currency is arguably one of the most important one for web browser (at least for security aware people). If there is one thing that a web browser must never ever ever do, it is to leak your private stuff to $bigcorporation.
Leaking the URLs of every website is already unforgivable. But doing this twice (to some extend, this time it's only the image URL and only if you actively enable it for now) shows that Microsoft might need to re-evaluate their company culture and ethics. I imagine that during the meetings where this was discussed the adult in the room was on a long Iceland hike. "Hey guys, how about we collect all image URLs so we can throw some fancy AI on them to improve the image resolution?" "Yeah, that sounds like fun!". And the missing voice should have been like "so, we do collect all image URLs including sensitive ones on our servers that allow us to track users and would give us the ability to create incriminating user profiles on most intimate and private browsing habits of user, AGAIN?"
Edge is not to be trusted for a long time. They violated your privacy TWICE now and it seems that the company culture is in no state to prevent this from happening again. They do not understand the concept of "privacy" and it appears that the trust model is based on the "you can trust us, just trust us we won't do bad things" model.
It's basically Google, just a little bit worse.
https://blogs.bing.com/search-quality-insights/may-2022/Turing-Image-Super-Resolution
https://www.techworm.net/2023/06/edge-browser-sends-images-microsoft.html