Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Windows 10 phones home when you search your start menu, even with Bing disabled

up1.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 288 posts

Re: Windows 10 phones home when you search your start menu, even with Bing disabled

#41

Post by ultramancool »

pedalpete wrote: post #40

The start menu is a combination web-search and local search. How could it not 'phone home' on a web search? Note the address it is 'phoning home' to is Bing. As far as what the contents of the package being sent is, I'll assume it is more information than necessary, and probably over-reaching until they get a slap on the wrist, but to call this phoning home is probably a stretch in itself. -- Edit -- Apparently the s…

This occurs with the web search disabled, which is the real concern. Sorry, I couldn't fit it all in the title, HN title limit is very short. I posted it in the thread but clearly people aren't reading that.

EDIT: I've changed the title of the post to clarify this. Hopefully that helps. 80 characters is quite annoying to work with.

Re: Windows 10 phones home when you search your start menu, even with Bing disabled

#45

Post by Paul_S »

justThis1Post wrote: post #38
blackbeard wrote: post #25

I'm starting to think I need to worry about things getting out of my firewall more than things getting in.

Couldn't agree more. These days we have to protect ourselves more from our own software than from viruses. Assume any software is a trojan horse, even the OS.

Or you could use free software.

Re: Windows 10 phones home when you search your start menu, even with Bing disabled

#46

Post by unluckier »

Is it really necessary to use a host that requires JavaScript to display an image?

Anyway, I've confirmed this. I've disabled web search and all of the other privacy options I've seen with Windows 10 during and after install. As soon as the first character is typed into the Windows 10 search box, the request goes out to www.bing.com. It doesn't say what you searched for (as the request happens before you complete the search), but it does send a lot of info to Microsoft about your platform, including a unique identifier.

Re: Windows 10 phones home when you search your start menu, even with Bing disabled

#47

Post by unluckier »

chatmasta wrote: post #34

This also happens on iOS with spotlight. As far as I can tell there's no way to turn it off. Source: MITM your iOS traffic. Sidenote -- a possibly unforeseen side effect of end to end encryption everywhere is that it makes it far more difficult to man in the middle your traffic and hold companies accountable for their privacy policies.

It's pretty simple if the OS you're using allows you to install a trusted root CA certificate.

Re: Windows 10 phones home when you search your start menu, even with Bing disabled

#48

Post by blinkingled »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #27
blinkingled wrote: post #19

It's the new norm apparently - everyone is doing this. Apple gives OS X away but nobody has yet got the memo that you are becoming the product. (Yosemite does exactly that by default - you can disable it though.)

I thoroughly doubt that Apple's endgame here is to make their users the product – given that the operating system is only available to people who have paid them money in the first place. A much more pragmatic conclusion is that they think this feature is something that users want. And in Apple's case, as well as others, it probably is.

You paid for the hardware and the OS that shipped with it. Developing a new OS version costs Apple non trivial amounts of money - development, deployment, testing, bandwidth, support etc. and they used to charge for them up until just a few years ago. Something's got to fund it - things like pushing more of Apple's online services, gathering user data etc provide some ROI to Apple.

Re: Windows 10 phones home when you search your start menu, even with Bing disabled

#49

Post by bcj »

blinkingled wrote: post #19

It's the new norm apparently - everyone is doing this. Apple gives OS X away but nobody has yet got the memo that you are becoming the product. (Yosemite does exactly that by default - you can disable it though.)

Does it though? All of spotlight's extra functionality seems to work even with wifi turned off. Even things like currency conversion rates seem to be stored locally.

EDIT: I just noticed I have spotlight settings turned off. Unless I forgot turning it off, I was either asked whether I wanted to turn it on, or it's off by default now.

Post reply on HN