UBlock-Origin shows me that openstreetmap.org loads content from the origin t-msedge.net. The logger shows this
From this output I assume that virtualearth requests these resources. The site https://virtualearth.net redirects to bing.com, so I assume Micro$ has bought it? Or was it always part of it?
Anyways, that domain is very odd, why does it have “msedge” in the name, as in “Microsoft Edge”? Researching on this, it may just be something with Azure. Here is the whois website, showing that it is owned by Micro$, nothing more.
Anyone know more about this?
I dont know, but would it be useful to only connect to Microsoft if the virtualearth map resources are actually selected? It seems they are always loaded.
What you are seeing is the request for the meta data for the Bing maps tile layer, not for tiles themselves. If you are playing by the rules that allow us access to Bing maps, you need to query the API before you display tiles.
iD is running this for every user regardless of if you are actually displaying Bing tiles, as Bings meta data API is notoriously slow and unreliable, so you want to get this out of the way asap.
You should have read the above in the relevant privacy policy, if it isn’t pointed out, you should ask the OSMF to add a section as we do here Privacy - Vespucci (last section). In any case this is not something new and at least near to a FAQ.
