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Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

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Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#151

Post by dizhn »

croes wrote: post #142
bastardoperator wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ehh, I think this is also a bad take. Turn off telemetry, delete ChatGPT conversations, and I like having an LLM for GitHub versus Give us all your personal data and we're sharing it with ad partners, your personal data is our number one product and secondary products are only made to support the first endeavor.

MS has lot more products were you can't completely turn off telemetry if you aren't using the Enterprise version. Don't forget the Office 365 "productivity" measures. And the latest insanity, at least for me, ads in the settings of Windows 11. Never ever put ads in any configuration menu of the operating system. That clearly says, it's not my computer, its MS's and they try to squeeze every penny out they can get. So…

Back in the dot com boom era they would give you a whole computer for free just so you would look at their ads. Now you pay for the computer and the OS and you get to look at the ads.

The Free PC people must be wondering what they did wrong.

Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#153

Post by baal80spam »

davidktr wrote: post #70
jareklupinski wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pay the very small fee for YouTube Premium and do away with all the ads because it doesn't do away with _all_ the ads: every video still has the video maker themselves talking about their 'sponsor' for at least a minute, reminding us to 'like and subscribe' for at least ten seconds, and a patreon scroll of users that have paid extra for another three minutes

The Firefox addon Sponsorblock blocks almost 100% of those ads. Together with uBlock Origin, I have an almost ad-free Youtube experience.

FYI - it's not a "Firefox addon", it's just an addon and it exists for Chromium based browsers as well. And I agree that it's fantastic.

Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#154

Post by rcme »

irusensei wrote: post #143
bemusedthrow75 wrote: post #67

I love VSCode, I use Google Workspace for my domain, run a Mac and an iPhone (and use iCloud), a Surface Go 2 with Linux (quite workable), I host on all sorts of stuff. Uncritically associating "trust" with a brand is a mistake. Microsoft are no more on the side of the angels than anyone else (and are very clearly on the other side in some of the legal positions they stake out, such as their amicus brief in support o…

I can’t force myself to like vscode. I need to code right? So I need 1-to be able to write text, 2-syntax highlighting. VSCode is an absolute mess of unnecessary plugins and popup that reminds me of an internet explorer 6 with too many web bars and a bonzi buddy dancing at the bottom of the screen. I also dislike Chrome and any chrome based reskin. I appreciate Firefox and even Safari. Specially Safari for the same r…

You can disable plugin suggestions.

Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#155

Post by samch »

candiddevmike wrote: post #8

This is a dumb take. They're both equally untrustworthy. VSCode has an insane amount of telemetry turned on, ChatGPT is monitoring everything you type, and GitHub was abused to train a LLM. Microsoft and Google have both shown they would sell your data in a heartbeat to make a quick buck.

It’s worth noting that Microsoft offers enterprise/business variants of most solutions that are (more) private by design. This includes GitHub Copilot, Azure OpenAI GPT services, Bing Chat, M365 Copilot, etc.

It’s really a consumer’s decision when it comes to Microsoft. Either you use the basic/free version in exchange for your privacy, or you pay for a business account.

I’m not sure Google really offers that as equitably across their offerings. They seem more focused on driving their ad/data collection business rather than private, enterprise solutions (just my two cents).

Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#157

Post by pb7 »

ftlio wrote: post #149
pb7 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube Premium exists and there are still masses of people that refuse to pay for it despite hating ads. You’re in the minority.

Where did YouTube enter the discussion? Also yes the things I search for would be in the minority of overall searches, but apparently finding Google unable to fulfill searches for these things despite it being able to do so 7 years ago is just memetic transference and not an actual critique.

Your comment was hard to read for me but I took it as you want a premium search that prioritizes results instead of ads. And I’m telling you that another popular product, YouTube, has premium and people don’t want to pay for it. So premium search would not change anything, except for a small minority of people like yourself.

The internet has changed drastically and become orders of magnitude bigger in the last 7 years. Your expectations may be unrealistic when there are so many parties that want to game the system.

Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#158

Post by hedora »

tadfisher wrote: post #99
Permit wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> sharing it with ad partners, What do you mean by this? What kind of information do advertisers get to receive?

None, because the data asymmetry is how Google earns revenue. If they just sold the data, you'd set up a competing ad network that undercuts AdSense by operating on slightly outdated snapshots.

This is why they charge third parties to run unauditable google-provided code on top of your data instead.

Also, they sell provide it governments in the form of warrant requests.

For more info, read up in google ad auction fraud, and google location warrant.

Microsoft is actually worse though. For one thing, Windows’ default telemetry level lets them pull files off your machine. Here’s a Microsoft apologist explaining it:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-telemetry-secrets/

The US CLOUD Act (which Microsoft lobbied for) means that they have to pull that data in response to US warrant requests, regardless of what country you are in.

Also, they already merged mojang (minecraft) into the Microsoft login umbrella. It is clearly a dry run for when they merge linkedin and github in, so they can provide better worker surveillance capabilities to their corporate customers.

Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#160

Post by sharminglkw »

542458 wrote: post #100
johannes1234321 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is: How much private repos went into copilot? I guess for specific software (how to use a commercial database? How to use some enterprise framework?) they'd find more relevant samples there, which might be worthwhile scanning.

GitHub has always said that they only train on public repos. I don’t see why they’d lie about that - including private repos would only add a relatively small amount of data to the corpus and would risk alienating all their corporate customers. > GitHub Copilot is trained on all languages that appear in public repositories https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/overview-of-github-copilo...

When copilot was originally released, I was able to get it to generate verbatim my extremely niche and poorly written code from a completely private repo. It was identifiable by the bad variable names that I used. I cant say they traines it on all pricate repos, but they definitely trained it on my private repos.
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