European Union data protection watchdogs said on Monday they were still concerned about the privacy settings of Microsoft’s Windows 10 operating system despite the U.S. company announcing changes to the installation process.
The watchdogs, a group made up of the EU’s 28 authorities responsible for enforcing data protection law, wrote to Microsoft last year expressing concerns about the default installation settings of Windows 10 and users’ apparent lack of control over the company’s processing of their data.
Remember Scroogled? Good times.
Until the point I don’t have to muck about directly with registry settings to get reasonable stuff done, I won’t take Windows seriously (I still probably won’t for other reasons even if this happens, but that’s separate).
Among the notable stuff on the list of perfectly reasonable things you can only do via editing the registry directly on Windows:
1. Get the OS to honor application DSCP marking on network traffic (by default, it ignores all DSCP marking requests from applications).
2. Hide the stupid OneDrive icon in the default file manager (even uninstalling OneDrive (which is a pain to do as well) won’t get rid of it).
3. Mark arbitrary network connections as metered (at least physical Ethernet connections need a registry edit to get marked as metered).
4. Completely disable the ‘app-discovery’ crapware which randomly installs ‘popular’ apps from the Windows store with no user intervention.
aherroin7,
Yep, any internet connection can be metered.
It seems to me the primary need for this is to combat problems that windows 10 created in the first place – hijacking bandwidth for itself and denying owners the ability to say no.
You know, if there were a law that allowed owners to bill OS vendors for all the bandwidth they consumed without owner consent, MS would fix this crap in a day.
Edited 2017-02-21 15:25 UTC
Most of the time cost is not an issue for me. The only case where it might be is when using my phone as a hotspot, and I rarely do that when using Windows.
For me, the bigger thing is that by marking a connection metered, you functionally make Windows updates manual instead of automatic on that network, which is big for me since I game a lot and the ‘idle’ detection that the update framework supposedly uses is absolute crap, so Windows will randomly start downloading updates in the middle of a match and send my latency to hell.
ahferroin7,
Yea, we are both referring to the same thing.
Owners, not vendors, should be in control over the computers they own. Every few years we loose a little bit more control. When it comes to windows, we’ve been on the loosing edge for a long time.
The default file manager in Windows is far more obnoxious than the fact that you can’t remove the OneDrive icon from it. IMO, that is the LEAST of its problems. In 2017, you would think they could at least put tabs in there. (And yes, I know there are 3rd party options, but those don’t help in a locked down, corporate environment.)
Edited 2017-02-21 17:34 UTC
I haven’t had this happen, thank god, but is this only enabled if you use a non-local account? I don’t tie my hotmail account to it at all at this point.
FYI: You responded to the wrong person.
Personally, I’m even more concerned about what happens after I change the defaults and turn everything off… and it’s still sending my data to Microsoft anyway! How about the EU get some sense? A setting means exactly as much as the vendor allows it to mean.
It actually is possible to turn just about everything off, you just have to go into the registry and local group policy to do so, so it’s prohibitively difficult for regular users.
And are those settings actually honoured in non-Enterprise versions of Windows 10?
Edited 2017-02-21 20:28 UTC
As far as I know, it’s all honored in the Enterprise, Education, and Pro editions, and the registry stuff (but not the local GPO things) is (mostly) honored in the Home edition.
Non-enterprise? Half of the damned group policy settings that used to control it aren’t even honored in enterprise anymore!
I don`t understand why everyone so hyped about Win10. I can`t even see why Win10 is better than 8.1! Im using Win8.1 for at least 5 years – not even single problem, while all my friends – use Win10. Everytime our conversation about PCs – everyone complains about Win10.
I hate it, seriously. I`m sorry for my anger, but this is truth.
They say that sometimes – some websites can`t be opened, even changing browser – won`t help a bit.
For example: http://uktopwriters.com/
My friend is student right now – he works all the time. And this Win problem got us both nuts! He always comes to me to get things done, because my Win8.1 works but his Win10 – don`t.
Win10 – is “shaite”, period.
I currently use Windows 10 LTSB, and this is the only tolerable version of Windows 10. It’s really, really different from regular consumer versions of Win10 in a way that it simply does not have most annoying stuff that makes Windows 10 unbearable.
I always spend ~30 minutes configuring OS after I install it, and after those 30 minutes I frankly don’t see or feel any noticeable difference between Windows 7, Windows 8/8.1 and Windows 10 LTSB. The only difference to me is how well these OS’es are supported by 3rd party software makers and hardware OEMs.
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