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Microsoft Edge removes ability to delete Sync Data from Cloud
- fernvenue 3y agoBy the way, Edge keep connect me to the cloud every time after update even if I disable sync, is it just me?
- quaintdev 3y agoMaybe that is it's way of trying to tell you to use a different browser as it is not reliable.
- fernvenue 3y agoYea actually I use Firefox almost all the time, Edge just told me never use it, lol.
- dgellow 3y agoI don’t have this issue. I never got sync enabled, either manually or by updating.
- TX81Z 3y agoThis is grossly illegal in the EU, is this a reliable source?
- fernvenue 3y agoAt least, I can't find the `reset sync` button now on version 114.
- kyriakos 3y agoProbably can delete them via your profile on Microsofts website, otherwise this is a clear Gdpr violation.
- fernvenue 3y agoIf someone else found this, please let me know :)
- asabla 3y agoI'm not logged into Edge on any of my machines. But this is how I've done it in the past https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/edge-learnmore-reset-data-in-cloud https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/edge-learnmore-...
- manderley 3y agoThat way no longer works, the documentation is out of date.
- WhereIsTheTruth 3y agoYou are not even the owner of your own data, disgusting that we collectively let that happen.. I'm glad I'm free of microsoft products, but it's sad for the people who rely on their products..
- ssss11 3y agoThis is basically “every company” these days. The disease has spread to the offline world as well where dystopian stuff like billboards that track you walking by exist. We collectively need to fix it.
- MiddleMan5 3y agoHow do we 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?
- libraryatnight 3y agoThat sounds like incredibly minor convenience at the expense of a lot of privacy. I'm not saying you're not entitled to your vote for the future but the shitville you're down with for the sake of not having to reopen a tab is sad. 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
- MiddleMan5 3y agoThat seems awfully harsh, and I'm not sure why you're being so cynical. I am interested in working towards a better future, but no matter how dumb you believe I am, comments like yours definitely won't lead there either. In an effort to continue the conversation constructively: 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?
- gmerc 3y agoAre they jealous of meta paying larger GDPR fines? Because this is a one way ticket to funding EU treasury
- can16358p 3y agoI think it must be somewhere otherwise it's probably illegal. 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.
- ikekkdcjkfke 3y ago[flagged]
- dgellow 3y agoI think you mean Microsoft?
- cybersol 3y agoFrom the headline this also seems to violate the CCPA in California.
- wintorez 3y agoHow low can you go?
- thrill 3y agoCan anyone read any more? That is not what the text in the image says. It says your data on Microsoft's servers ("the cloud") will be deleted, but that the data on your devices themselves will not be deleted.
- Goronmon 3y agoThat's the text from the old feature. The new feature further down only mentions syncing your local data with what is on there cloud.
- rhaway84773 3y agoAs an aside, I just wanted to give a shout out to the GDPR. There was a lot of well deserved suspicion for that piece of legislation, and it’s obviously not perfect (and in fact has a lot of flaws). But as the large number of comments here referencing it indicate, it’s probably the second effective tool for user privacy that has been made available so far, the first probably being ad/trackers blocking extensions. And unfortunately it’s pretty clear with the browsers being owned largely by ad companies, these extensions are not gonna be useful for too long. 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.
- Stranger43 3y agoThe EU was designed by paranoid lawyers and diplomats rather then the naive idealists that made most national constitutions, which makes it both very hard to love and brutally effective at producing legislation that don't crumble the second someone devious start to look for loopholes.
- Dalewyn 3y agoDoes this have any bearing (insofar as identifying) if a Microsoft account is not provided to Windows 10/11/Edge?
- fernvenue 3y agoPersonal experience, I never login to my Windows devices, but Edge can still auto login my account from other Microsoft applications such as OneDrive, Office and even Microsoft Store, as I mentioned earlier, Edge will connect my account every time after update even if I disable sync.
- keithnz 3y agoseems straight forward to delete, their help page (linked to on the sync options page) explains how https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/sign-in-to-sync-microsoft-edge-across-devices-e6ffa79b-ed52-aa32-47e2-5d5597fe4674 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/sign-in-t... I think maybe all they did is rename the button to represent what it actually does.
- deafpolygon 3y agoThe reaction is overblown; it's still possible to remove your data. And you have control of it at the privacy dashboard here; https://account.microsoft.com/privacy https://account.microsoft.com/privacy
- manderley 3y agoYou can't delete your browsing data on the privacy dashboard at all.
- deafpolygon 3y agoI don't know what you see on your end, but I can. https://imgur.com/a/KtWvoec https://imgur.com/a/KtWvoec
- ano-ther 3y agoI wouldn’t call it straightforward. Instead of a button, you now have to 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.
- Havoc 3y agoMaybe just don't use browsers owned by giant data slurping companies at all...
- deafpolygon 3y agoWhat's the alternative?
- Stranger43 3y agoFirefox is still around. 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.
- Havoc 3y agoChromium or Firefox would be a good start
- userbinator 3y agoDillo, NetSurf, Links, Lynx, ... 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.
- deafpolygon 3y agoThose are not workable alternatives. I agree, in principle, that some sites are more bloated than they need to be. But that's like saying "air bags, power locks, windshield wipers~ somehow the auto industry has convinced that all cars must have these features"... People want them. So we have them. Dillo, NetSurf, Links, Lynx... also do not sync browsing dasta.
- LightBug1 3y ago[flagged]
- nologic01 3y agoThere needs to be an alternative to big tech so that we can move on from this perennial angst of abusive corporate practices and focus on the positive, hopeful, uplifting aspects of computing. 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.
- candiodari 3y agoWhat's wrong with Firefox?
- globalnode 3y agoand why would anyone sign-into and use edge.
- mhuffman 3y agoDepending on how you installed windows, logging into Windows is enough to have you logged into Edge (and other MS services) when you open it.
- fernvenue 3y agoEdge can still auto login my account from other Microsoft application, even if I'm not login to my Windows devices.
- l8rlump 3y agoYep, it did this to me and helped itself to the data from my Firefox profile, and presumably uploaded this to MS servers. Great way to obtain data on a person I suppose.
- _cenw 3y agoThis seems to be a common pattern with Microsoft Services these days. A few months ago, Outlook for Mac switched to seemingly requiring you to opt-in to having your IMAP credentials (or Google OAuth token I guess) stored and your mailbox and calendar mirrored to an Exchange box. There was an opt-out, but it required clicking "Not IMAP?" to use IMAP. There is also no way to discover if Microsoft stores your credentials or your mail, how much of the mail, and no way to explicitly delete the mirror. 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.
- 2Gkashmiri 3y agopeople should not need browser data sync. MOST people only use a single phone. what are they "syncing' to? this whole thing looks like forced adoption for the sole purpose of collecting and harvesting data.
- Stranger43 3y agoDoes this mean that old microsoft is back? 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.
- csydas 3y ago>Does this mean that old microsoft is back? 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.
- microtonal 3y agoAll these security/privacy violations are one of the reasons I use Safari (besides better battery life) and just ignore sites that are Chrome-only [1]. Apple uses end-to-end encryption for Safari history, iCloud tabs, tab groups: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303 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.
- thombles 3y ago> What happens here when you click button is, Edge deletes browsing sync data from Microsoft servers and stops syncing on all other devices you’re signed into 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.
- manderley 3y agoIt's not true, Chrome works that way, but not Edge.
- stavros 3y agoI don't quite understand why there isn't a central "sync server" and protocol. Why does every app need me to pay $20/mo for sync (other than the fact that they'd really really like me to), instead of there existing one service that provided a really good sync API? 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?
- koonsolo 3y agoI love my Linux Mint. It's a breeze to install, runs on older hardware (old laptops my kids are using), and can do basically everything any other OS can do. 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.
- k8sToGo 3y ago> 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.
- prmoustache 3y agoIt really depends if your corporate environment is toxic or not.
- pawelduda 3y agoWe set up now 14 years old laptop for my parents who hardly used anything like that, total tech newbie level.... With Ubuntu 14, it was running with minimal maintenance since then, recently upgraded it to 21 because repos were too outdated to install chrome that worked with JS on weather forecast site they visited regularly. Nearly 0 problems with the upgrades except it took half a day to download and install. 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.
- squarefoot 3y ago> WTF are people still doing with this Windows thing? 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.
- openplatypus 3y agoI know the article mentions workaround. They better re-enable delete bytton promptly. This smells like sever GDPR violation.
- drumhead 3y agoI feel Linux is the answer to so many of these problems, its just not the one most people want to hear.
- everdrive 3y agoI agree with you, but I think people don't understand. If Linux gets popular enough, it will start drifting and becoming more like Windows. There will be monetized distros, and a sea of terrible software, etc. I strongly believe that Linux only avoids some of the problems of the mainstream solely by being a niche product.
- Finnucane 3y agoDon’t we have that already? At least with Linux we have a little more choice about what we’re willing to live with.
- predictabl3 3y agoI don't see how you arrive at this conclusion at all. I strongly disagree that that is likely let alone inevitable. 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.
- edandersen 3y agoFor anybody that wants to remove Cloud Synced Data in Edge, visit edge://sync-internals/ and click "Disable Sync (Clear Server Data)". Some PM has hidden the option but the function is still there (for now).
- pigbearpig 3y agoThis is totally a non-issue and fake headline. You can still delete it, they just made the feature better.
- mark_l_watson 3y agoI tend to use a lot of services from Microsoft, Google, and Apple to do my personal research, write my books, and for occasional consulting projects. There are a lot of trade offs and decisions people need to make for themselves. 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/ 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 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.
- m4th3us 3y agoAbout the books, I found Privacy is Power. Is that what you meant? The Power of Privacy is a documentary.
- mark_l_watson 3y agoSorry, yes, Privacy is Power.
- stuaxo 3y agoThis sounds like a GDPR violation ready to happen.