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Comment by kenjackson | Hacker News Reader

Is it analyzing buying habits or just the item he is looking at?

And can’t you just turn this off?

I don’t think this is the right question to ask. Browsers can push any number of malware or tracking and then exclaim “can’t you just turn it off?”. I understand that some users find this feature useful, I just completely disagree with how it was rolled out.

You're assuming this is malware or tracking. I don't think that assumption is warranted. And at least this unasked-for feature is ostensibly pro-user, unlike Firefox's user-hostile additions like the Mr. Robot nonsense.

People use Edge? I assumed that a majority of users do what I do on a fresh install, and download literally any browser that's not made by Microsoft, and set it as default.

You're talking Windows users. They already either know they're being tracked and don't care, or who don't know they're being tracked. Why would they care about a different browser?

Fair point. Guess I've been an outlier since the first time I sat down at a keyboard, never been happy with defaults.

Windows can be very pushy about resetting the default every now and then. One update a year or two ago opened a full-screen ad for an Edge tutorial that could only be skipped by going into the task manager and force closing the process, and even then unset the default browser and added an Edge icon to both the taskbar and desktop. I wouldn't be a surprised if a lot of people have been bulldozed into taking the path of least resistance.

How is it possible to show alternatives to the products you view without tracking those pages?

The trivial non-tracking implementation would be for edge to install the entire database of products and prices to your local device.

Whether that is practical or not depends on just how large the database is. But even if the database were to be too large, it'd still allow us to reduce the question to one of how to download the database incrementally to the device without leaking information, which is a solved problem. (E.g.the Safe Browsing algorithm.)

The trivial non-tracking implementation would be checking if the domain of a requested page matches a certain list of known e-commerce sites. If so, then on load, query the other known e-commerce sites through a proxy to see if there's a cheaper price. No tracking necessary.

That would be both highly non-trivial and non-private.

For the non-trivial part, the approach would be hell to scale to any significant number of e-commerce sites. You can't have the client connect to tens of thousands of sites on a page load. And how do you reliably find the matching product pages on the other sites? It's easy if you can crawl the sites, but extremely hard if you tried to do it with point lookups.

As for the privacy, who operates the proxy? Why is giving them both your IP address and a stream of all commercially interesting web pages you visit not a tracking concern?

If the browser doesn't work with your ethics of how a browser should operate, then it isn't the browser for you. That's okay. There are other options out there.

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