Microsoft Says IE8 Phoning Home Is "Pretty Innocuous" 194
CWmike writes "Microsoft has defended the IE8 tool that suggests sites based on URLs typed into its address bar, saying that the browser 'phones home' only a limited amount of information to Microsoft and that the company discards all user IP addresses almost immediately. Company managers also contrasted IE8 Beta 2's 'Suggested Sites' feature with the 'Suggest' feature used by Google Chrome, saying that Microsoft's requires the user's explicit permission before it's used. They did acknowledge a bug that prevents the request from reappearing when users reinstall the browser. Cyra Richardson, a Microsoft principal program manager on the IE team, said: 'Suggested Sites is connected to the browser's history, and it's not looking at each of the keystrokes. IE only captures the URL as it is navigated [to], when that URL goes into your history.' Nor does Suggested Sites log and transmit cookies to Microsoft's servers, as does Google Suggest, Richardson said. 'The data we log is actually pretty innocuous.'"
damn right...almost (Score:3, Interesting)
Open up the protocol (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft and Google should just publish the exact data exchange protocol used by their respective "smart search" features -- and keeps those documentations up to date, of course.
The protocols are gonna get out, anyway -- someone will snoop them out soon enough. Better have an official documentation than endless wild rumors, and the whole thing would hardly cost any resources.
Re:Just remember... (Score:5, Interesting)
Holy Jesus man, have you even been to any other web forum? Compared to the normal signal-to-noise ratio on the internet, Slashdot (if you browse at +3 or +4) is a cut or three above just about anything else, and almost exclusively so for unmoderated forums. But yeah, other than that, you hit the "groupthink" idea right on, except for that a lot of people, lately, have been getting annoyed at google's "collect data for everything" policy, among other things.
Users say piracy is pretty innocuous (Score:5, Interesting)
After all most users who pirate Microsoft products discard most of them almost immediately.
Yeah that works doesn't it? If you violate someone's right's it's not okay just because you do it for a short time! Cuts both ways.
Re:Just remember... (Score:0, Interesting)
You trust Google more than Microsoft when it comes to your privacy? Now Microsoft has a pretty long history in the pc world. Can you cite me any truly egregious privacy violations commited by Microsoft, well besides their lack of focus on secutrity.
I think on the privacy front Microsoft has the better record, and to me Google is starting to look like the CiC [wikipedia.org]
A better feature (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Just remember... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What did you expect them to say? (Score:3, Interesting)
Except we know Google will store and OWN all the data. And, if it comes from someone criticizing the Chinese government, it will turn over said data to said government.