Is Microsoft Stealing People’s Bookmarks?
I received email from two people who told me that Microsoft Edge enabled synching without warning or consent, which means that Microsoft sucked up all of their bookmarks. Of course they can turn synching off, but it’s too late.
Has this happened to anyone else, or was this user error of some sort? If this is real, can some reporter write about it?
(Not that “user error” is a good justification. Any system where making a simple mistake means that you’ve forever lost your privacy isn’t a good one. We see this same situation with sharing contact lists with apps on smartphones. Apps will repeatedly ask, and only need you to accidentally click “okay” once.)
EDITED TO ADD: It’s actually worse than I thought. Edge urges users to store passwords, ID numbers, and even passport numbers, all of which get uploaded to Microsoft by default when synch is enabled.
Paweł Komarnicki • November 17, 2021 8:16 AM
This whole “keep asking” loop is such a shady antipattern that it’s high time to have a proper guideline for that. I would just make it an opt-in system like the good email newsletters are: you are presented with the button to share your data with the app, and then (and only then) a system dialog is shown. Nothing around that should be automated in any way!