Microsoft Edge removes ability to delete Sync Data from Cloud
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Not a niche, nerdy altermative. A mainstream, institutionally recognized and supported alternative.
The capability is already there, almost, in the form of all the amazing open source communities have achieved.
But now we need to win maybe the most important battles of all: Winning the moral and political argument and.convincing people that free and open source computing is not a weirdo obsession but the bedrock on which a democratic society will be built.
Really looking forward to a future HN where every second entry is not about how an entrenched business class has confiscated and abuses our digital future.
There is really no reason to use Chrome on Windows 10/11 these days.
I am no Microsoft fanatic but it is useful and convenient for me to use it also on iPad and Android to share bookmarks, send tabs between devices.
Is it perfect? Nope. Somehow scammy Microsoft Rewards is enable by default.
* Under control of your employer (spying that you'll actually care about), more so than chrome, and a LOT more than firefox.
* Constant changes by the evil empire, never in the interest of the user, including the evil empire that you work for in the case of active directory
* Still (imho) doesn't match Google services and syncing in functionality and how well it works
* Same browser engine as Chrome, so no real advantage
Just install your favorite ad blocker directly from the chrome web store
> Constant changes by the evil empire
Same problem with Chrome
In my eyes edge is mostly equivalent to chrome. Edge has native vertical tabs and slightly better Windows-integration, Chrome slightly better Google-integration. Both are under the control of both your employer and a tech giant with questionable ethics. And both tech giants use their respective platforms to aggressively promote their browser.
I guess we could agree that you should use neither.
2- with the hype and hoopla of ChatGPT, a surprising number of non-tech savvy people heard " Microsoft has AI, Google doesn't", so they'll actively use Edge (and Bing) for the generative AI
The tricking people to sign in stuff is nefarious and is a more recent and growing problem. Google even gets away with it through iOS by forcing app logins/"authorization" that then results in the user logged in to Google on Safari. The whole Chrome logging in if someone checks their Gmail is terrible.
If your computing experience solely comes from a non-tech role in a corporate work environment where your employer legally owns your devices and they are remotely controlled and monitored, then all of this may seem fairly mundane. Otherwise, it is concerning anyone on hn would think what is going on here is ok or does not need to be actively avoided.
The Center for Humane Technology has good articles and video presentations on good tactics to use tech to your advantage. https://www.humanetech.com/
I can log into my work account in the browser, letting me save my work passwords to a trusted account, and search internally using Bing. It also has decent Outlook integration, which is helpful to my workflow.
I also love vertical tabs, because I end up managing 100+ tabs at work regularly. I'm eager to see a fully conceived version of this appear in other browsers because it's honestly a game changer.
And, not a huge deal, but when you copy a URL from the address bar, it pastes as a formatted link, which is really helpful when you have to do this regularly.
It really isn't a bad browser, it's just got poor privacy, which isn't important for me when I'm working. My employer already knows what I'm up to anyway.
I use Chrome as a personal browser, so it's nice keeping them completely separate from each other.
As for Firefox Sync, the protocol is byzantine and poorly documented[1], while using it “properly” requires emailing a human at Mozilla to “document expectations and timelines”[2], which for a hobby or small-scale application I read as “fuck you”. (Using it improperly, like filching the API key from one of the official clients, risks tripping the hostile and deliberately undocumented security heuristics.) For me that’s already enough to reject it for anything I couldn’t bear losing (like my passwords).
[1] https://www.codejam.info/2021/08/scripting-firefox-sync-lock...
[2] https://www.codejam.info/2021/08/scripting-firefox-sync-lock...
But I need to upgrade my PC. When I do I'll try Firefox again. Would be awesome if it would work for me again.
We are paying for pretty much everything and in countless different ways (including taxes)
The idea that the only way "to pay" is to some oligopoly keen on surveillance capitalism is absurd. If well-intentioned it is just self-limiting.
...yeah, thought so.
Who is going to win in the long run? The small number of people who care about privacy/their data VS the billions willingly using these malicious services? Even in tech/IT crowds, most don't care about privacy first products. Even on this forum it seems to be pretty split down the middle. Internet users have been getting free browsers, email, search, etc, for a very long time now.
I don't see the average person waking up one day and saying, 'I want to take my data back'. The government is not to be trusted. Personally, I think abstinence is the only solution.
By undermining trust with users (turning them into products) they put a lid on the market.
So even from a pure financial perspective they have opted for short term profit and killing the golden goose.
I've attempted to educate friends/family on tech privacy concerns, but nobody cares, even my friends in the industry. I have many tech friends that won't even modify their home network, let alone ditch FB or Google or Snapchat or Tiktok. Ultimately, computing and the internet is untrustworthy and always will be so. I don't possess the knowledge or time to assess every line of code or dependency in a project. Let alone backdoors in chips, hardware, and my ISP providing a line to the NSA.
Abstinence + sabotage of platforms is probably the only way. Keep the corporate developers busy fighting spam, fraud, abuse - make it unprofitable to build spyware.
To me the commingled business models of big tech as we have come to know them, dipping their fingers at every possible data jar, are an outlier, a dissonance.
How and when this could resolve into something more stable its not obvious. Politicians can go being immoral and look the other way for a long time. But you cant buy all the politicians all the time.
If we start by clearly separating what is really free (because its a commmon public good paid by all), from what is paid by users to private companies for real services provided in competitive markets and with respects to their clients (not product) we'll be on a good path.
National security related privacy is another can of worms altogether. You really dont want a repeat of 20th century dictators dissolving democracy and exterminating whomever they managed to cast as the enemy with the ruthless efficiency of an AI guided panopticon.
I mean these things are pretty basic. Only when we give up on common sense will dystopia become a reality.
It's not a false argument, it's a question. Which you pointedly didn't answer, and instead resorted to base emotional manipulation.
> The idea that the only way "to pay" is to some oligopoly keen on surveillance capitalism is absurd.
Strawman - nobody proposed that idea except you.
Really hoping that dang will start cracking down on extremely emotionally manipulative rhetoric like this. Your post makes no interesting points, and is instead a stereotypical example of emotional, empty, partisan political rhetoric that is present throughout most of the internet and media these days.
I'm glad I'm free of microsoft products, but it's sad for the people who rely on their products..
We collectively need to fix it.
How do you offer proprietary stateful services or applications without limiting the storage and management of personal data to a single machine?
I love being able to pick up my phone with the same browser tabs I was just looking at on my computer. I love being able to order lunch with the credit card I added to my virtual wallet on my cell phone. I also understand that developing features requires real-world input data.
This is a genuine question; what might the data structures, storage systems, and user experience look like in a modern company that lets users own their own data?
I don't believe you want to fix it which is why youll always fixate on why it's hard and you like how easy shit is
I understand the power of connected systems because I've worked with distributed computing systems for the better part of a decade. The more servers the better in my field, and the more situations they can compute in (my pocket, a volcano,space, etc.) the better. I like my computers connected, but I also like them under my control.
There's a reality to swallow; my grandmother doesn't want to configure a server, or understand what a certificate or even a yubikey is. A truly universal privacy and security management system has to do better to make privacy accessible.
Context is important; my health clinic knowing my cholesterol level: important. My credit card company knowing my cholesterol level? Unnecessary. It's going to be important to categorize personal information and provide controls on access.
What if my government adds a new type of issued ID? How does a company efficiently request access to my "swolshon_id" and provide rationale for it's use?
Is a company allowed to reject services if I choose not to provide a portion of my user data? Alternatively could some requirement be to require companies provide services that operate with limited access?
Strictly from a computing standpoint (I can't address healthcare providers etc.), the root of many of these problems are at the consumer OS level and the incentives for the companies which build them.
We have three big problems: Google, Apple, and Microsoft. The incentives for these three are misaligned from having secure multi-device computing.
Amazon is as bad or worse, just look at the issues they've had with employees accessing Alexa audio recordings along with their security camera stuff. Fortunately their phone flopped.
Out of the big three, Google has been the worst offender here for the last 10 or so years. Apple has been pretty good, especially with actually security the hardware and stomping out 0days, but watch out: advertising is their growth business. Microsoft has a long history that isn't trustworthy.
Post-GPT3.5+, privacy matters a whole lot. The difference between people who will get completely p0wned and those that don't will be how much public and accessible data is out there. This will have a perverse feedback loop of companies demanding even more personal data and proprietary verification hardware.
I've read people on here argue against using such extensions. There's the initial argument that it doesn't work, but the Google team banned it from the chrome store so it must have had some effect.
Then there is the argument that it helps fingerprint your browser into a unique user, which actually is only possible any more in Chrome, specifically not Firefox. If you're using Chrome already, it seems like a safe bet that every single website you go to is already being sent to Google anyway, so what does it matter.
I also get it if it's somewhere harder to find as:
- they obviously don't want everyone clicking it regularly
- from a UX perspective it's a very edge use case and having it buried somewhere less seen makes sense.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/edge-learnmore-...
I think maybe all they did is rename the button to represent what it actually does.
1 Click help
2 Find the right section (so you don’t accidentally delete your local data)
3 Go to the privacy dashboard
4 Find the button there
Technically, you can delete, but decided to remove the easy option for users.
WTF are people still doing with this Windows thing? Especially here on HN, I expect everyone ditched that shit OS with shit browser a long time ago already.
It is not the employee who usually decides the OS in a corporate environment.
Put SSD in it, it's flying, parents can tell the difference. I set up one way SSH via tailscale to it so I can install updates and fix things when I'm not at their place lol. Going to keep this laptop running as long as it refuses to die.
Many are forced by their bosses ignorance, possibly fueled by corporate partnerships with Microsoft which implies the use of Windows and related technologies. Others were sucked in because they saw WSL and VSC as a good thing while those are actually the weapons created with the intent of taking away users and developers from the real Linux. Other non power users mainly because of non technical media and press not giving a damn about products not advertised by corporations, and objectively because if something goes wrong on their Linux PC, not everyone has a Linux kid around to solve the problem.
Some others (the majority) are not capable of installing or maintaining it.
I personally don't understand what "maintaining linux" is. I have a dock icon that says "update available", and then I click "update", and it runs the updates. Never had any problems with that (Linux Mint).
On Windows, each application has their own update schemes, and it can all go wrong there. And the updates of Windows, what a pain! All the "don't shut down your system now" kind of things... horrible.
This is not the olden days of Linux anymore you know, it's just all super user friendly. I would say more user friendly than Windows.
Try to do a major Windows upgrade, and compare that to a major version update of Linux.
I bought a desktop, and forgot about that laptop.
But my trust in linux got dented there. I'm happy you have had a good run, I did too. The risk is too high for me to jump into 'debugging linux problems' mode at a random time. I cannot afford the disruption and downtime.
Oss is nothing like vc-funded sw dev. The incentives and expectations couldn't be more different.
Plus I find other idea of fedora or arch or debian or nixos becoming proprietary a bit laughable.
Also, as someone who was heavily involved in student government in college, I’m absolutely stunned and amazed at the legislation that manages to come out of the EU, which is structured like a Kafkaesque nightmare, and yet, somehow, manages to churn out better legislation than pretty much any other legislative body on the planet.
Then I could point all my apps to my SyncApp account, authorize them, and they get their own directory where they can put all their data in. It could even have a higher-level interface, like SQL or CouchDB or whatever makes the most sense.
Does iCloud work like that?
I did go through a few instances with GDPR supervisory authorities and eventually got a few questions about this answered by Microsoft.
"Based on your request please find the information related to your query:
• How long is mail data fetched from the non-Microsoft server retained? On 31st day of user inactivity we mark the account for removal. The account is soft deleted, and the data is purged within a week (approximately) after that.
• What happens with an account that is no longer being used? Does the service continue fetching and “enhancing” mail data or does it happen on demand when a user opens Outlook? - If the user is not signing into the 3rd party accounts using outlook mobile, Teams for life or Outlook for Mac. We stop syncing any data after 7 days and mark the account for deletion after 30 days.
• How do I know what data the service holds? - Service holds Mail, Calendar, contacts data and profile data for the user (User provides consent to collect this data during add account flow).
• How can I make sure data is no longer retained? (e.g., does logging out from Outlook delete the mail data and credentials?) - When removing the account in Mac you can choose to "Sign Out On All Devices" which deletes the mailbox from the Microsoft Cloud (Exchange-backed mailbox where the third-party account is being synced)."
This is at least a violation of GDPR as in the service strongly suggests mirroring is required for functionality whereas Article 13 2(e) makes it clear that the data controller must make it clear if data collection is a "a necessary requirement". The Supervisory Authority (dataprotection.ie) didn't seem to care though.
We all know that edge is a thing because it's being tied into windows as the default browser for opening links in a way thats hard to permanently disable, so it's basically the behavior they got fined over with IE back in the old days.
It never left.
> edge is a thing
I'm not sure anyone, even Microsoft, really knows why Edge is a thing even; Microsoft already basically has lock-in for some time on consumer computing because of Windows; MacOS, iOS, and Android have their strong competitive pieces of the marketshare by competing on either controlling the entire stack (Apple) or on price and ubiquity (Android), so I'm not sure why the browser wars of all things is a hill that Microsoft is insistent on planting its flag upon.
It's not like Internet Explorer had been relevant for any significant time, and even when it was dominant, it was only so because there weren't any other options and home computers were still new; there wasn't much weight to the browser decision except for people who were invested in such arguments -- everyone else just wanted to see what the Web was and didn't really care how they got there as long as it worked.
As I get it, Chrome was useful for Google because Google already had all that other data from Search, and Chrome just helped ingest more data and add a platform as a gateway to all of other Google's services; Microsoft doesn't really have anything to usher users into. Even Apple hasn't really bothered with this with Safari, which remains fairly simple in terms of integrations and services, and instead uses the entire Mac stack to get people onto its services from any number of given points
So I really don't know why there is so much focus on Edge from Microsoft; with the Bing Chat, I guess they saw a spot where Google was floundering and took a stab at making Edge + Bing a daily thing, but I'm not sure that it's grabbing people like Microsoft hoped it would; that Google is having similar traction issues with Bard makes me think that the AI integration is premature and not the savior either company hopes it will be. The Moat Memo about Google and OpenAI was quite candid assessment of why Google and OpenAI were going about LLMs incorrectly; I think it's not a leap of logic to group Microsoft along with them, as the same concerns from the memo apply to Microsoft; FOSS models and projects are doing far more with less resources than any of the aforementioned companies.
So I really don't get why Microsoft wants Edge to be a thing and why it's trying to make it part of everyone's lives without anything particularly nice. Decisions like the article are something I'd expect to come once everyone's already locked in, not when Microsoft is still clawing for market share. There aren't any "wow-ing" elements to anything you get from Edge, and it's quite lacking compared to other browsers. The things you do get with Edge that other browsers don't have are things that no one really wants; I don't think people like the forcefulness from Microsoft about Edge and at best people tolerate Microsoft's behaviors, I don't think anyone actually wants most of them.
Maybe it's just that because they have nothing to lose, Microsoft is willing to go hard with very aggressive ideas since at best it works and makes them some money, at worst they continue to have no adoption. The failures will be forgotten by an audience with short memory spans who instead just look for the next thing to get dramatic over, so I guess there's not really a downside to what Microsoft does, but man, it has to be an expensive gamble that I just can't see the pay off on.
On Windows there are still a lot of applications that rely on an browser engine they can embed into the application. That used to be MSHTML, but is now being moved to the Edge-based WebView2[1].
[1]: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview...
Microsoft still has gobs of cash as s result of those services. Edge isn't necessary for any of it.
this whole thing looks like forced adoption for the sole purpose of collecting and harvesting data.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303
[1] We used Gathertown at work for a while. I'd install/uninstall Chrome Brave every time we'd meet up in Gathertown.
Is that true? My (possibly faulty) recollection is that if you subsequently launched Edge on another device that had been syncing then it would cheerfully reupload all your data to the cloud. In any case, glad I've jumped ship.
Two books are useful: Surveillance Capitalism, and The Power of Privacy.
Not as much privacy oriented, but I find the Center for Humane Technology https://www.humanetech.com/ organization a good source of thoughtful material.
Off topic, but after writing my last book on using LangChain/OpenAI/Hugging Face with your own data (you can read it online for free https://leanpub.com/langchain/read) I am looking at AI and personal knowledge management from a perspective of maintaining personal control and privacy in a new book I just started writing Safe For Humans AI (and grabbed the domain with the same name). This is a difficult problem unless you either own very high end compute at home or are willing to rack up major cloud spend. Using top-K text chunk matching using embeddings (LangChain and LlamaIndex) is much cheaper and easier than fine tuning public models, but both techniques have their own applications.
As is Brave and Opera but i do recomend that people look deeper into their owners before blindly trusting them.
As the main codebases are mostly open it still a competitive market once you look at the edges as the small browsers are still viable for day to day use.
Big Tech has unfortunately convinced many developers that all sites must be huge bloated webapps that only work in the latest versions of their browsers. Reversing that propaganda will be the most difficult part of making the Internet great again.
People want them. So we have them.
Dillo, NetSurf, Links, Lynx... also do not sync browsing dasta.