bingbing - 2:43 pm on Sep 30, 2012 (gmt 0)

@Leosghost, I (the developer) have no toolbars installed. The toolbar is installed in an office that uses the software via the web.

Some people install toolbars without knowing. Many toolbars come bundled with other software downloads. In this case the office did not even know that the toolbar was installed. It actually came pre-installed on a office PC.

Toolbars that do this so-called useful "URL discovery" are spyware plain and simple. Only very recently have mainstream articles appeared covering this stealthy behaviour of toolbars such as Alexa and Bing.

Microsoft have now confirmed that BingBar is the issue in our case, and it was reporting URLs back to MSN. Having read the privacy statements of the toolbar in question, it does not even mention "URL discovery".

More seriously, it does not matter if you password protect your folders or not, since Bing will still try and contact the URLs. In our case the accesses generated 404s because we had an IP check in place, but that's not the issue. The issue is that Bing was monitoring, in real time, our browser habits and reporting it back to see if it could gain access.

Read this (http://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/bing.mspx#EZ) and try and find where it tells the user that the toolbar will not just use your searches in Bing, but will actually monitor all the URLs you enter and send them back to Microsoft central for possible search engine inclusion. They can't seem to answer this...