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Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

#191

Post by LeoPanthera »

KirinDave wrote: post #164
monochromatic wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are ads in the fucking start menu? Everything I hear about Windows 10 confirms my choice to steer clear.

Generally: no. By default the store app MIGHT show some logos for featured apps, but that's as far as it goes. The live tiles for stores can show pictures of products. You can elect to remove them if you don't like them. Live tiles are one of the most powerful and useful features of the windows start menu. Like any feature, it's conceivable they could be misused. Unlike notifications, the user has complete, simple, a…

> Generally: no

That's very misleading. The option is called "Suggestions" and it's on by default. I'm convinced they called it that because if they called it "Ads", everyone would turn it off.

> By default the store app MIGHT show some logos for featured apps

That is far from only problem. Here is a screenshot of a Win10 start menu, out of the box, at default settings. Count the ads:

http://cdn5.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/img_55b...

Re: Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

#192

Post by caskance »

khedoros wrote: post #185
caskance wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both the enterprise and educational versions offer you full control. Consumer versions offer what I consider to be enough control, but obviously that's subjective. If you offer the option to disable telemetry, some people will disable it. If there is any pattern to which people do this, and we all know there is, it introduces sampling bias and casts aspersions on any conclusions you draw from that data.

It seems like they're trading one bias for another. I suspect that the population of users likely to disable telemetry have a lot in common with the population of users likely to just stick with Windows 7 and remove the updates that added telemetry collection. Personally, I'd probably be satisfied if Microsoft gave me the tools to examine the telemetry that my computer wants to send. Not making that available to user…

They already made that trade by allowing enterprise customers to turn it off.

They also tell you exactly what types of data they collect, along with where and how. That's not consistent with wanting to hide the extent of their telemetry.

Re: Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

#193

Post by magicalist »

KirinDave wrote: post #164
monochromatic wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are ads in the fucking start menu? Everything I hear about Windows 10 confirms my choice to steer clear.

Generally: no. By default the store app MIGHT show some logos for featured apps, but that's as far as it goes. The live tiles for stores can show pictures of products. You can elect to remove them if you don't like them. Live tiles are one of the most powerful and useful features of the windows start menu. Like any feature, it's conceivable they could be misused. Unlike notifications, the user has complete, simple, a…

> By default the store app MIGHT show some logos for featured apps, but that's as far as it goes

Yeah, those are ads. It's like when the homescreen of my Kindle that I paid more for to get without "Special Offers" started showing books I may be interested in buying based on my reading history. Also known as ads.

It's insulting. I'm sure over their entire customer base it comes out as a positive feature for them, though. People more likely to click through to the store when they see a game name or screenshot they recognize, while only alienating a few.

At least, as you said, they offer an explicit and easy way to disable them, unlike Amazon at the time, who then took years to add an option to disable those.

Which, by the way, is all I'm asking for on the telemetry front as well. Opt-in by default all you want. Bury the setting three panels deep (don't reset it at your whim, though). I'll feel insulted and slightly dirtied, but I'll disable it and move on, active Windows customer that I am.

Re: Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

#194

Post by magicalist »

caskance wrote: post #192
khedoros wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like they're trading one bias for another. I suspect that the population of users likely to disable telemetry have a lot in common with the population of users likely to just stick with Windows 7 and remove the updates that added telemetry collection. Personally, I'd probably be satisfied if Microsoft gave me the tools to examine the telemetry that my computer wants to send. Not making that available to user…

They already made that trade by allowing enterprise customers to turn it off. They also tell you exactly what types of data they collect, along with where and how. That's not consistent with wanting to hide the extent of their telemetry.

> They also tell you exactly what types of data they collect, along with where and how

where?

Re: Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

#195

Post by merb »

krick wrote: post #174
rms_returns wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Open-source, meanwhile, has struggled to provide a basic desktop environment to rival the best from five years ago. Open-source is pretty young on the desktop arena. Consider that Microsoft ruled the entire nineties and tried all tricks in the book to sabotage linux. Despite this, the fact that linux desktops are even available today is nothing short of a miracle! IMHO, the GNOME and Unity desktops are mature enoug…

> Can you cite a single widely used software that doesn't have a FOSS alternative which works on Linux. Woah, really? There are plenty. Photoshop & Lightroom debatable, but I can agree — nothing FOSS really substitutes them, unfortunately. AutoCAD & ArchiCAD. Solidworks. Pretty much all specific 3D modelling tools like Poser (though I don't really need that last one). Ableton, Cubase, everything from NativeInstrument…

> Decent speech recognition and text to speech. Nonexistent.

Nuance Dragon SDK runs on Linux, it's not FOSS but it runs there. Just no GUI / Command Line App.

> OCR is quite better, but still loses to commercial alternatives like ABBYY. Understandably so.

Nuance and ABBYY SDKs running on Linux. Quite well. Just no GUI / Command Line App.

Oh and you don't need to use FOSS only just because you are using a FOSS OSS.

And yes Audio / Video is pretty weak on Linux, thats true. However for most other things there are good enough tools. Especially LibreOffice is really really great. It's better for Users migrating from Office 2003 than to migrate to 07/10/13/16. However there are weaknesses, too, like the Dictonary.

Also some bigger Office's Macro's aren't easy replaceable. However Linux is good enough for the most.

Re: Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

#196

Post by magicalist »

caskance wrote: post #190
magicalist wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were probably asking so that when you pointed the "options" out explicitly it would be clear that, no, in fact, they don't "offer those options" to the majority of Windows 10 users.

It also makes it clear that they do have quite a few options and the reason they don't have the rest is because they don't pay for them.

> It also makes it clear that they do have quite a few options and the reason they don't have the rest is because they don't pay for them.

Won't let you pay for them.

Or please do point me to where I can buy that individual license for Windows 10 Enterprise.

Re: Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

#197

Post by clouddrover »

agentultra wrote: post #72
dantillberg wrote: post #60

I spent my holiday break shifting my alignment 2 or 3 points towards Stallmanism. The existence/collection of statistics like this increase my confidence in that choice. Between Windows privacy craziness and Apple's continuing lockdown of OSX (I think that System Integrity Protection augurs an iOS-like walled-garden future for OSX), I recently switched all of my OSX/Windows/Ubuntu systems to Arch Linux; it takes some…

I went the other way around. I started with your conclusions and have been migrating to the Apple ecosystem and am tempted to move to Windows. I had become tired of the dearth of issues that crop up to maintain an Arch desktop distribution. While the privacy collection issues should be addressed and be transparent to end-users I think open source is not the way to go for these devices. I'm tired of each device being…

> dearth of issues that crop up to maintain an Arch desktop distribution

A dearth of something is a lack of it (see http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/dearth). So a dearth of problems is a very good thing. I think you mean a plethora or an excess.

Re: Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

#198

Post by krick »

merb wrote: post #195
krick wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you cite a single widely used software that doesn't have a FOSS alternative which works on Linux. Woah, really? There are plenty. Photoshop & Lightroom debatable, but I can agree — nothing FOSS really substitutes them, unfortunately. AutoCAD & ArchiCAD. Solidworks. Pretty much all specific 3D modelling tools like Poser (though I don't really need that last one). Ableton, Cubase, everything from NativeInstrument…

> Decent speech recognition and text to speech. Nonexistent. Nuance Dragon SDK runs on Linux, it's not FOSS but it runs there. Just no GUI / Command Line App. > OCR is quite better, but still loses to commercial alternatives like ABBYY. Understandably so. Nuance and ABBYY SDKs running on Linux. Quite well. Just no GUI / Command Line App. Oh and you don't need to use FOSS only just because you are using a FOSS OSS. An…

Question was about FOSS. Answer is about FOSS. Thus, what you are saying might be useful for somebody, but totally irrelevant to my comment.

Re: Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

#199

Post by pyre »

KirinDave wrote: post #159
caskance wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm objecting to the claim that users are "powerless to stop this [data collection] even if they knew what was happening, and they don't." To the contrary, it's very clear what is being collected and how to turn it off. As well as what you can't disable in cheaper versions, and which versions you need to buy in order to get that option. Obviously consumers would like Microsoft to sell them a product with more feature…

The shitfit is this sort of cognitive dissonance. As Apple does a lot of this shit without discussing it and has for years, but mysteriously people are comfortable with OSX. And of course, mobile apps are saturated with complex metrics collections. Every major phone app ships with a huge sum of metrics embedded that can be monitored and almost no mobile apps discuss this. Need we even mention web sites and their ines…

The part you are missing is the more users use Microsoft than OSX. See how many of these people are complaining about being Microsoft users and feeling like they need to ditch Windows. These people probably didn't complain about Apple as much (or at all) because it didn't affect them. Now Microsoft has brought it to their front door, and they are forced to deal with it head-on (note: just accepting / ignoring the situation is also a form of "dealing with it").

Re: Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

#200

Post by petke »

mikegerwitz wrote: post #7

Let's start gathering statistics on how many times people open their refrigerator, or use the toilet, or take a shower. What's more concerning about these data aren't these specific numbers, but what other data that implies that they have, what they can do with it, and what they can infer about you from it. Privacy and anonymity aren't (reasonably) possible on a Windows 10 operating system. Any entity knowing that I…

Such statistics would be very useful to society. Tracking people as a group to figure out how they behave. Its only when the tracking targets individuals that it get creepy.

"New York'ers goes to the toilet x times a day" is fine vs "John Doe goes to the toilet x times a day" is not.

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