Security News > 2020 > September > Microsoft leaks 6.5TB in Bing search data via unsecured Elastic server. *Insert 'Wow... that much?' joke here*

Microsoft earlier this month exposed a 6.5TB Elastic server to the world that included search terms, location coordinates, device ID data, and a partial list of which URLs were visited.

The data appears to be generated by the Bing mobile app, which promises users "Getting rewarded is easy, just search with the Bing," and has been downloaded more than 10 million times from Google's Play Store at least.

In 2006, AOL released what it thought was anonymised search data for research purposes, though journalists soon proved this wrong by identifying some of the searchers.

A Microsoft spokesperson told us: "We've fixed a misconfiguration that caused a small amount of search query data to be exposed. After analysis, we've determined that the exposed data was limited and de-identified."

Anybody can make a mistake, but there is an implicit deal with search providers like Microsoft and Google that we get personalisation and improved search results in return for allowing them to collect data on our behaviour.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/09/23/microsoft_leaks_over_65tb_bing/