Microsoft posted a blog post today about Windows 10’s data collection and privacy, and Ars Technica’s Peter Bright dissected it.
The second category is personalization data, the things Windows – and especially Cortana – knows regarding what your handwriting looks like, what your voice sounds like, which sports teams you follow, and so on. Nothing is changing here. Microsoft says that users are in control, but our own testing suggests that the situation is murkier. Even when set to use the most private settings, there is unexpected communication between Windows 10 and Microsoft. We continue to advocate settings that are both clearer and stricter in their effect.
Microsoft’s got a trust problem.
For a long time…
W3.1 : would it boot up ?
W95 : would it not BSOD ?
*chuckle* I just recently set up an old P133 to dual-boot my old DOS6.22/Win3.11 and Win98SE licenses for nostalgia and, somewhere along the line, I accidentally set up a bug in Win3.11 where Program Manager will crash if File Manager is the first thing you open after starting up Windows.
I was mostly refering to the memory consumption problem, but hey, I wasn’t ever aware of this bug. Nice one
‘Almost’ quoting from another comment on another website, that sums up things quite properly:…
Yeah … right.
They might be fighting the good fight now but we have no idea what they will do in a couple of years. Meanwhile they will be amassing huge amounts of data that can uniquely identify you.
So lets see, for the sake of the argument lets assume they turn bad in the future, they (or anyone they share their data trove with / whoever manages to steal the data) can identify you by voice, handwriting and possibly facial recognition if you use that for login.
Still think it is a good idea for MS, or anyone else for that matter, to know that much you? I find it creepy to say the least.
I trust my government more than a US company because I’m not a US citizen, but I don’t even want my government to know those things. They have some of those features because I got a passport and because it’s the law and I’m not happy about it at all.
Because unlike a password or a private encryption key, I can’t easily replace it when it gets stolen.
Edited 2015-09-29 11:56 UTC
Must be a different Microsoft then.
Not the one who wants that new law passed that would indemnify them for any cooperation they lend the US government: http://www.osnews.com/story/28856/Apple_Microsoft_abandon_pro-priva…
Seriously, they are not fighting for their customers’ rights when opposing handover of data stored in Europe, they are trying to get into a legally safe position instead of where they are right now and either violate US or EU law
They had to do that, because of their ‘cloud services’.
Microsoft wants to run their own services in other countries under other jurisdictions.
But I would be very, very surprised if they won that court case. It’s very unlikely. There is no law which prevents the US government ordering a US company to comply to their laws.
It almost looks to like states, countries and unions (EU) want people to use more cloud services BUT they also want access to the data:
http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2014/31c3_-_6195_-_en_-_saal_g_…
RIP Caspar Bowden.
Treat it like Hard Drugs
JUST SAY NO!
The problem is that the OS in itself is rather good, despite the ugly looking interface that makes almost impossible the see tabs of the sliders.
Stripped down of the internal malwares, it is a decent product. But I bet we get what we paid for.
Where one of the “disable WinSpy” programs was run to see if they actually worked? Because if they do I don’t see any difference between Win 10 and stripping Google apps from Android, I really do not care what the corp wants, all that matters is whether I can flip off the switch or not.
https://github.com/Nummer/Destroy-Windows-10-Spying/releases
While MS has had trouble breaking into the phone and handhelds markets, Google, Apple, Facebook and others have been highly successful with business models that give the user zero privacy. I think MS saw users accepting this and decided, “hey, we need to join the party.” So they did. By default Win 10 gives you zero privacy.
Hopefully everyone here is aware of the Win 8 and 7 updates that take away your privacy on those systems, too. See — http://www.techtimes.com/articles/80373/20150830/windows-10-privacy…