Internet Explorer 8 Reports Back to Microsoft!

“Microsoft has defended the Internet Explorer 8 tool that suggests sites based on URLs typed into its address bar, claiming that the browser “phones home” only a very limited amount of information to Microsoft and that the company discards all user IP information almost immediately. (I love the usage of the word “almost” in that line) Company managers also compared Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2’s ‘Suggested Sites’ feature with the ‘Suggest’ feature used by the Chrome browser (Google’s new browser), saying that Microsoft’s requires the user’s explicit permission before it’s used. They did acknowledge a glitch that stops 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.'”