Microsoft Edge Sucks Up Chrome Data Without Permission
reclaimthenet.org
reclaimthenet.org
Promote change through high quality, do not adopt the same tactics tech uses to spam people.
Googling the names of the authors I just find stories at the site, or blogspam at other sites based on those stories. Most of what they cover has already been covered at more well known sites whose ownership and authorship information is more open.
It gives off a vibe as being scammy.
Perish the thought.
smh.
The problem isn't that the data is available. It simply has to be available if you are to use it. The problem is that your OS is now a virus all on its own. The OS is not a threat vector you can easily mitigate without just using a different OS.
why should tab information from Chrome be exposed to the OS to begin with? Of course an executable can prevent leaking unencrypted data. But we're not even talking about this in a 'hard' sense here. Edge is likely just using some API or export feature or reading some history file. Of course browsers can prevent this.
Any protection mechanism you're imagining is managed by the OS. You trust it to enforce file permissions, to enforce memory isolation, to prevent a rogue program from snooping on data as it's unencrypted. You can't hide these things from the OS because the OS is the only thing that can hide data.
The OS has full, unrestricted control of the hardware at a level much deeper than you do. The OS can just read your encrypted data from 'secure' memory. It has to be, otherwise you couldn't read it. The OS can access any file because it has block level access to all drives.
And there's not one single thing you can do about it. There's absolutely nothing stopping your OS from spying on you in this way.
Unless you use an open source OS which can be proven to not do bad things.
More discussion from earlier this week:
Permission.
Users should have been able to enable/disable this, but as usual, that's not what happened.