Study: Microsoft Edge sends frequent hashed IDs tied to hardware to its back-end servers, making it one of the least private browsers available
Microsoft Edge is one of the least private web browsers — even more so than other popular browsers like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox — according to academic researchers.
Context & Ripple Effects
Microsoft relaunched Edge on Chromium in January 2020, marketing InPrivate browsing and tracking prevention as headline features of the new browser. Weeks later, academic researchers report that Edge frequently transmits hashed identifiers tied to the user's hardware to its back-end servers — ranking it below even Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox on privacy.
The finding lands just as Edge's reach is expanding: within weeks it would pass Firefox to become the second most popular desktop browser, meaning any telemetry baked into defaults scales with that installed base.
First-order effects
- Microsoft's launch positioning of Edge as a privacy-conscious Chromium alternative is directly undercut by its own research community — the tracking-prevention pitch now competes with documented hardware-tied identifier transmission in the same product.
- Users choosing between Chrome, Firefox, and Edge get an academic data point showing the newest entrant ranks worst on privacy, complicating Microsoft's differentiation against a browser (Chrome) already associated with data collection.
Second-order effects
- Mozilla gains a concrete talking point for privacy-focused positioning against both Chromium browsers, since the study gives Firefox an independent benchmark rather than a self-serving claim.
- The episode foreshadows recurring scrutiny of Edge's outbound traffic — by 2023 users would again flag Edge sending visited-page URLs to the Bing API, suggesting telemetry defaults become a persistent reputational drag Microsoft has to keep explaining.
Third-order effects
- If hardware-level identifiers become standard in default browsers, browser privacy shifts from a feature toggle to a structural question about OS-vendor incentives — the vendor controlling both the operating system and the default browser can anchor identity across them in ways third-party browsers cannot.
- Sustained academic auditing of browser telemetry points toward default-on data collection becoming a regulatory and procurement issue, forcing vendors to treat transparency about what leaves the device as table stakes rather than a marketing line.
The trend: Default browsers are becoming telemetry-rich identity surfaces for their platform owners, with independent audits — not vendor privacy pages — setting the terms of comparison.