Is Edge any better or worse than Chrome on privacy?

Edge does not (e2e) encrypt your synced browsing history and your bookmarks. In the help pages Microsoft tries to weasel itself out of it by talking about TLS or encryption "at rest".

Chrome on the other hand can do end to end encryption by providing your own password.

Windows 10 has an advertising ID that is passed via Edge to Bing Ads. Chrome does the same thing with a low entropy ID passed to DoubleClick. In both cases this is used to track you. The difference is that Microsoft can potentially track your behavior in other apps as well.

Google is also very transparent about what they collect about you. You can also opt out of any collection or personalization. Do you know what Microsoft collects about you? They sure collect a ton of telemetry, with no way to opt out in some cases. The terms of Windows Insiders for example are ridiculous.

And Bing Ads is generating about $8 billion per year which isn't pocket change. If you think Microsoft isn't making a shitload of money from ads, you're wrong.

In other words they are very equivalent, but due to lacking end to end encryption for synchronized data, I can't touch Edge.

Note that I don't use Chrome either, only for testing like you. Firefox is better than both if concerned about privacy.

I believe it's a better alternative to Chrome if you are already using Windows.

Edge Chromium still has telemetry data sent to MS but it respects the privacy control and group policy in Windows, so if you have already set Windows telemetry to low, it sent almost nothing. I recommends usage of "O&O ShutUp10" to disable all Windows and Edge telemetry.

It doesn't have telemetry data sent to Google (no contact with Google owned domain).

It also has a third party tracking blocker included and enabled by default which makes it way better than Chrome on that point. On my installation, it even blocks Microsoft tracking...

I use Pi-Hole to keep track of the domains reached by Edge and so far, there are nothing really worrying me (I already use Windows so my expectations are relative).

It's significantly better. Basically, Microsoft added the tracking protection features[1] Firefox and legacy Edge have to Chrome. Yeah, in terms of sending data to Google vs. Microsoft, that footprint is similar, but third party tracking differences are huge. Edge sends a fraction of the requests to third party services while web browsing as Chrome does.

Google has decided to implement third party cookie blocking in Chrome recently... solely in incognito mode[2]. Firefox, Edge, Safari, etc. all do it all the time in normal mode too. This renders Chrome the least privacy-minded browser, primarily because Google heavily values ad tracking as a business practice.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/with-its-new-edge-browser-micr... [2] https://venturebeat.com/2020/05/19/google-chrome-83/

From a study conducted by Douglas J Leith from the School of Computer Science & Statistics at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, they found that the new chromium based Edge is sending hardware UUID's back to Microsoft and there isn't an option to turn it off.

"From a privacy perspective Microsoft Edge and Yandex are much more worrisome than the other browsers studied. Both send identifiers that are linked to the device hardware and so persist across fresh browser installs and can also be used to link different apps running on the same device. Edge sends the hardware UUID of the device to Microsoft, a strong and enduring identifier than cannot be easily changed or deleted. Similarly, Yandex transmits a hash of the hardware serial number and MAC address to back end servers. As far as we can tell this behaviour cannot be disabled by users. In addition to the search autocomplete functionality (which can be disabled by users) that shares details of web pages visited, both transmit web page information to servers that appear unrelated to search autocomplete."

https://bgr.com/2020/03/11/microsoft-edge-browser-privacy-is...

It's currently worse due to the lack of E2EE history/password sync and increased metrics collection (even the new tab page tracks you).

Chrome has E2EE history/password sync, which allows you to specify a sync encryption password that is different from your Google password.

It should be better, but you might as well use Vivaldi, if you need a chrome-based browser. It comes with tracker blockers included and has a lot of privacy and power user features.

The full readme is worth the read about chromium/chrome. But this highlights edge differences. No browser is perfect, but you can always be able to restrict things or use GPo baselines to limit browser use.

https://github.com/CHEF-KOCH/Chromium-hardening#chrome-vs-ms...

You can read their respective privacy policies to understand what data they collect and how it is used.

If you're skeptical of their legal terms, then you're better off with Chromium as it remains open-source. Edge unfortunately is a closed-source product.

If you are concerned about privacy of chromium-based browsers, I don't think anything would beat just straight chromium.

However, on my machines I just main firefox with edge as a backup. Mainly because edge is already pre-installed on my Windows machines so there isn't really much point downloading and installing an alternative which does the exact same thing. Especially if it's only for use on chromium specific websites.

It's not like you can remove edge from Windows 10. Why would I install Vivaldi, Google Chrome or Brave?

You're looking for Ungoogled-Chromium. Or honestly. Just mitigated Chromium.

Privacy is not as important as security, because without security you potentially lose both.

It's worse,plus it does shady crap like sniff browsing history on other browsers.

I use Edge when using Google services such as Gmail and Chrome when using Microsoft services such as Office 365. That way they can't log me into the browser when I log into the service.

in terms of privacy, Edge has the edge (badum-tss) over Chrome because of the built-in tracking prevention, and telemetry disabled by default. That's it.

your privacy really depends on how many "sweeties" do you use. If you let all those "helper services" enabled by default, your privacy is more compromised that if you take 3 minutes to go through the settings and enable only what you want.

If you're concerned about your privacy, just read their privacy policy. In general terms, it comes down to Google wanting to get as much information about you as possible, and Microsoft is rather interested in how you interact with their services. In either case, you have access in your account dashboard to what information has been collected, and check how in Google's case it's up to the minimum detail, whereas in Microsoft is like "yesterday you used Outlook, Edge and OneDrive...". Also, in either case, which is something many people fail to understand, the collected information is actually anonymous. They don't care if you are John Doe or Alice, Bob's wife... they care that UUID likes this and that, and do this and that.

I have been testing Edge on iOS for Privacy practices. I think there are lot of things to improve. Also, it would be great for Edge to make it easier way to report and have discussions. Currently it’s a black box.

- https://twitter.com/konarkmodi/status/1258163915319640071

- https://twitter.com/konarkmodi/status/1258185278168223746

- https://twitter.com/konarkmodi/status/1262019416914644994

- https://twitter.com/konarkmodi/status/1258338835722887171

Not privacy related but on Windows 10 I find Edge to be performing a little better compared to Chrome under the same tabs / workload / extensions. Its anecdotal though so I can't be certain, anyone else has similar experience?

Privacy is such a vague and useless term nowadays that it is very difficult to say what is better unequivocally. So it would be useful if you define what you consider to be 'privacy' and what matters more vs less.

If you care at all about privacy, I don't see how you could stomach either. Firefox is the only reasonable choice when it comes to privacy, and even that isn't perfect.

as a rule of thumb no proprietary browser is good on privacy.

Edge isn’t great. Why not look at de googled chromium or brave instead?

I have maybe one website that I like to use brave for and the rest all work with Firefox 100%

On MacOS, I was rather surprised to find the truly extraordinary amount of locations Edge installs stuff, which aren't removed when deleting the app.

My impression was they we're trying to survive all uninstall attempts by using two dozen different methods to autostart various services and updaters?

With Google’s practices of gathering your personal data, why is Chrome even in the running in any of the discussions about browsers? I mean, Firefox and Safari exist, people. But maybe it’s me. What am I missing here?

Somewhat unrelated, but I started having many websites that don't work properly in Firefox in the last couple of weeks...

Might be very slightly better in itself, but combine this with all the other telemetry Windows 10 collects and overall I'd say the amount of telemetry collected on you by MS is about the same.

The whole reason that Microsoft creates this product is for tracking.

Not based on actual research, but my guess is that with Edge, you'll now have Google phone-homing combined with Microsoft phone-homing. Unless Microsoft actively went out of their way to remove calls to Google, there may still be many present, as found in many reports about Chromium.