> basically all of the information gathering that people complain about with Windows can very easily be turned off. In fact, for the most part the installation wizard actually leads you through how to turn it off. For me that makes it a non-issue, although I understand that some feel differently.
It's absolutely not a non-issue when I was helping my mother set up her new Win10 laptop.
She doesn't want to be tracked, I don't want her to be tracked.
But currently she is being tracked by Microsoft very much.
As are millions of other people that REALLY do not want to, if they had the choice.
There was no wizard when I got there to help her. Obviously she had set up most of the laptop herself because she's not intimidated by computers and really pretty good with them (at age 66). Except she couldn't get email to work.
And neither could I, btw. She wanted two accounts in the windows 10 default mail client, one from the ISP and a very old hotmail account. Somehow this just wouldn't work and the stupid mail client was actively hiding the information I (or she) needed to troubleshoot the problem (not just a bit, I got like zero information. and a numerical error code. it's beyond me why MS would want to translate standard error messages from IMAP and SMTP into something even more cryptic). I ended up installing Thunderbird, which works.
But I digress. My mom is not a HN-reader, so she hadn't quite heard about Win10's totalitarian surveillance features, and when first setting up her laptop she wasn't quite sitting there in the adversarial position of "I'd rather brick my system than let it spy on me" that any of us would need to assume in order to later claim "the information gathering that people complain about with Windows can very easily be turned off". She doesn't want to be tracked, so I'm sure she ticked off a couple of the checkboxes that were clear about it.
But maybe not the ones that popped up warnings about your system. Or the ones that were misleadingly worded as if they are something beneficial ("just like the US government does" is not really a bar for good intentions) that you need to Google to figure out what they really mean. Or the tiny checkboxed that only explain their maliciousness in a very tiny font next to the big friendly letters that just want to steam you through the wizard. (I didn't see any wizard, but this is the deliberately misleading I remember from win8, obviously intending to grab as much private info from users while pretending to give them a choice).
During the afternoon I helped her, I only had time to set up the email and do a few other things. In addition of having to wait through 45 minutes of some giant update, which upset her a bit because it was a brand-new laptop, high-end thingy, why did we have to wait for things to happen? Damn right. The longer I'm on Linux, the more and more ridiculous it seems to have the OS yank control from you at what are probably the most inopportune moments (boot-up and shutdown ... really?!)
So I didn't have time to help her, Google for all the privacy options in Win10 and disable them.
What you probably don't know, because you "easily" disabled them right away, is that after this initial setup phase, Win10's remote surveillance features are as quiet as they can possibly be. (until you try to disable them of course at which point they'll scream bloody modal murder)
And with her, that situation is by no means unique. There are millions upon millions of sufficiently able people running Windows that are currently being tracked, against their wishes, because the options are misleading and/or hidden. And they even pay Microsoft for the privilege ...
So yeah no. Just like computer security in general isn't about you being safe and protected from criminals, that's easy enough, unless you're being targeted, if you are clever and paying attention, don't click the shady popups/emails and you're mostly fine.
Criminal phishers or ransomware peddlers would be out of a job (or be more clever) if everybody has the knowledge like that.
Just like Microsoft wouldn't have even bothered doing all that work on their surveillance tracking systems if the features would have been as "easily turned off" for everyone that doesn't want to be tracked.
Just like any whitehat hackers, on the rare occasions I hear them about the fundamental moral reasons why they do what they do, in addition to "hacking is fun" (also goes for grey/blackhat), is every time not because they and their tech-savvy friends need their protection, no we're catching the bad guys and fixing the vulnerabilities because our mother, grandfather, neighbour, partner, nephew and that friendly man at the cigar/magazine cornershop need the protection because they don't want to be hacked just as much as we don't, but not everyone has the time to dig into computers as deeply as us to protect ourselves.
And you know, those very same people also don't want to be tracked, given the choice. At the very most they'll shrug and admit defeatedly "well, yeah, ... I don't mind so much, I guess" -- because to them it seems to be price to pay for not having to really dig deep into their system and just be able to use that laptop for email and web-browsing.
But no, they don't really want to be tracked. It's NOT a choice, for them, it factors as an additional cost of being able to use a computer.
Source: I teach people (of all ages, but mostly children 8-18y) general computer usage. None of them want to be tracked. None. The ones that even claim they do, I haven't met a single one that, after sitting down and talking for a while, didn't just boast "oh, I don't care" because the alternative would be admitting that they don't have the skill/knowledge to fix the situation, or because simply not using Facebook because it's creepy as fuck, would be social suicide. That's not a choice. It's not a choice!
Just because we (hackernewserpeoples) are clever enough to opt to not pay that cost because it's technically optional, doesn't make it a "non-issue".