Yet Another On By Default Voyeuristic Edge Feature To Disable

Microsoft Can’t Stop Peeping At Their Users

There is yet another on by default feature Microsoft Edge offers that you will likely want to disable.  The Enhance images in Microsoft Edge feature is designed to upscale low resolution images, making them sharper and improving the lighting and contrast.  The assumption was that this feature used your own hardware to carry out this transformation, and until very recently Microsoft did nothing to disabuse us of this assumption.

However, it seems that enough people have noticed that is not the case and Microsoft Edge Canary users now see a pop up revealing the truth.  The pictures you view in Bing are sent to Microsoft for processing, as Edge loads them.  This means Microsoft could well have a copy of every picture you have ever viewed when using Edge.  You can see the pop up above, which informs users of what Microsoft is actually doing.  In these Canary versions you can load up the Settings page on Edge and try to disable the feature under the Security section, however at this point the current version of Edge does not offer you that choice.

As Neowin points out, this is not the first time an on by default Microsoft Edge feature has been caught spying on users, and very recently at that.  Their creator follow feature would track every single URL you visited and send them off to Redmond.  Microsoft have claimed that was an unintentional bug, and are supposedly working to resolve their behaviour.  If your version of Edge offers either of these features under Privacy, Search and services, you should seriously consider disabling them for now.