{"id":496163,"date":"2023-06-13T15:25:34","date_gmt":"2023-06-13T13:25:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=496163"},"modified":"2023-06-13T15:33:12","modified_gmt":"2023-06-13T13:33:12","slug":"edge-browser-sending-users-viewed-images-to-microsoft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/security\/496163-edge-browser-sending-users-viewed-images-to-microsoft.html","title":{"rendered":"Edge browser sending users’ viewed images to Microsoft"},"content":{"rendered":"

Microsoft’s Edge browser sends images viewed by users to the company’s servers, Neowin reports<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

The publication has discovered that the Edge browser’s “super-resolution” feature, which enhances photo quality, requires that Microsoft be sent the image URLs to work its magic.<\/p>\n

AI-powered super-resolution improves the clarity, sharpness, lighting and contrast of images on the web.<\/p>\n

Microsoft first announced the feature in May 2022<\/strong><\/a> and launched a version for videos earlier this year<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

The latter uses the on-device processing power of graphics cards with AI upscaling capabilities.<\/p>\n

However, according to Neowin, the company only clarified that the image super-resolution feature uses a different approach in recent Edge Canary updates.<\/p>\n

Before this admission, some users had been under the impression that the enhancement was also performed on-device.<\/p>\n

However, clicking on the question mark icon next to the feature in Edge will show users that it uploads the images to support super-resolution.<\/p>\n

Aside from giving the company a peek at the images you are viewing, a major issue is that super-resolution is enabled by default.<\/p>\n

If you are a Microsoft Edge user and don’t want to send every image you look at to the company’s servers, you will find a toggle to switch it off within your Edge settings.<\/p>\n

The specific section setting you should look for is “Enhance images in Microsoft Edge”, which can be found under Privacy>Search>Services.<\/p>\n

Neowin said Microsoft plans to update the feature to allow users to exclude specific websites’ images from being sent to its servers.<\/p>\n

\n

Now read: Microsoft will pay R385 million for illegally harvesting kids’ data<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Unlike Edge’s video upscaling tech, the browser’s image-enhancing feature requires that Microsoft get the URL to apply “super-resolution”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341042,"featured_media":489177,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[35224,123,18745,84817],"class_list":["post-496163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-security","tag-edge-browser","tag-microsoft","tag-online-privacy","tag-video-super-resolution-vsr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496163"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341042"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=496163"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496163\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":496227,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496163\/revisions\/496227"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/489177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=496163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=496163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=496163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}