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

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

#51
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How, pray tell, does free change the problem except in fantasies? There is plenty of "free" software that contains the same problem.

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

#52
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not a guarantee of privacy or anonymity. See: SourceForge. Generally a step in the right direction though.

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

#53

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.

I think this is worse though. It fires even when you've disabled web search through most GUI interfaces. It might stop using Windows Firewall > block SearchUI.exe

It will even ignore a-0001.a-msedge.net in your hosts file.

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

#56

As time goes by, computer software begins to feel more and more hostile to the user. When I installed Windows 10, all the privacy settings made me feel like I was wrangling a beast rather than setting up something that would help me. I don't know if there's any solution or if privacy is just a remnant of the past. Is Linux any better? And is there any way to own a smartphone which is built not to leak my information,…

The Blackphone is built for privacy and Linux is pretty at not leaking private info, although you have to configure Ubuntu a bit I hear.

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

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You might be paying for the hardware and two or three OS versions. It's in Apple's interest to keep everyone upgrading, so they might as well just put the average expected OS upgrade cost into the hardware, and rely on planned obsolescence (which is pretty easy as computer hardware keeps improving) to keep that expectation relatively low. Sure, a few users will upgrade hardware all the time and a few will never upgrade, but that doesn't throw off the economics too much.

(I also feel like analyzing specific pricing decisions is missing the forest for the trees of "If you're not paying for it, you're the product." It mostly applies to whether an entire business model is free, e.g. Facebook. Several years back, Microsoft used to give out free memory-card-to-USB adapters for the original Xbox, intended for keyboards for MMORPGs, but also useful for jailbreakers. I requested one. Did I become the product?)

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

#58
I opened a bug (well, feedback item) during the preview about this. Even with the various group policy settings set, there was no way to disable web search. Rather unacceptable. One would think this has regulatory and compliance issues as well, no?

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

#59

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.

> This also happens on iOS with spotlight. As far as I can tell there's no way to turn it off.

You can turn it off from Settings > General > Spotlight Search. Uncheck "Spotlight Suggestions" and " Web Results".

The "About Spotlight Suggesstions & Privacy" link at the bottom of that settings page gives you instructions on how to do it too.

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

#60
post #56

As time goes by, computer software begins to feel more and more hostile to the user. When I installed Windows 10, all the privacy settings made me feel like I was wrangling a beast rather than setting up something that would help me. I don't know if there's any solution or if privacy is just a remnant of the past. Is Linux any better? And is there any way to own a smartphone which is built not to leak my information,…

The Blackphone is built for privacy and Linux is pretty at not leaking private info, although you have to configure Ubuntu a bit I hear.

I looked into blackphone a while ago. If I remember correctly the first thing it asks for is your e-mail address so it can sign you up to their proprietary anonymity/cloud service. I'm not sure if this is still the case, but if it is I think they've completely misunderstood their target audience. Thanks for reminding me though I will have another look into it.
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