microsoft edgea Chromium-based web browser developed by the Redmond giant, leaks or at least leaks sending URLs visited by users to the Bing API website. The problem with privacy protection was pointed out last week by users of the social network Reddit. According to their version, they noticed that the latest version of the app sends a request to bingapis.com with the URL of almost all the pages that users have visited during their browsing sessions. Microsoft says it is investigating the reports.

A Reddit user named hackermchackface, who first discovered the data breach, said that “searching for links to this URL returns very few results, there is no documentation for this feature”. Other Reddit users have started reporting the same problem, but not the reason why Microsoft Edge is sending URLs to the Bing API site. Because of this, The Verge decided to go further and asked Rafael Rivera, a software engineer and one of the developers of EarTrumpet, to investigate the matter.

Rivera discovered that the data leak stems from a poorly implemented new feature in the browser. “Microsoft Edge now has creator tracking enabled by default. The intent seems to be to alert Bing when you’re on certain sites like YouTube, The Verge, and Reddit. but it doesn’t seem to work properly when sending almost all visited domains to Bing“.

Microsoft began testing the creator tracking feature last year with the goal of implementing it in Edge. The specified property is designed to allow the user to follow content creators on portals such as YouTube, but apparently due to poor implementation it has become a sort of bulk crawler that sends too much data to the Bing API website. Fortunately, just disabling this feature is likely to put an end to the privacy issue.

Microsoft Edge Content Creator Tracking Feature.

Blaming an app for being a massive data breach isn’t exactly palatable, so Microsoft has launched an investigation and will try to find a solution. Caitlin Roulston, director of communications at Microsoft, told The Verge: “We are aware of these reports, are investigating them and will take appropriate action to resolve any issues”. Of course, the company has yet to explain why the URLs are being sent to the Bing API website, or how Edge was configured to send almost all URLs to said website.

Turning off the feature that lets you track Microsoft Edge content creators is easy. To do this, the user must open Settingsgo to the section “Privacy, search and services” and then go down to the section Serviceswhere you have to uncheck the option “View suggestions to follow creators in Microsoft Edge“. This should be enough to prevent browsing history from leaking to the Bing API.

Microsoft has been trying to add value to its web browser for a long time by including some interesting features like Image Creator integration. However, it seems that this time it has been reversed.