61–70 of 596 posts
I dont' know why so many people are surprised by the Cortana data vacuum. Doesn't Siri send everything you say to it to Apple or a "trusted partner"? Why would Cortana be any different? The keylogger and Start menu ads are just creepy though. I shouldn't have to opt-out of targeted ads INSIDE MY OS.
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Something like Cortana could have been built to work locally, using your own resources. But it wasn't. This was an opportunity to say "we're not like Siri and Google Now, we respect your privacy", but instead they built something just like them.
But the entire point of the service was to use data mining techniques so that you could use natural language directives to say "add a reminder to my team's calendar to update some presentation in O365, etc"... Maybe you don't find it that useful, but I think that a lot of people would. It will, in a future release, be genuinely useful. It's getting there.
"Send typing and inking data to Microsoft to improve the recognition and suggestion platform" "Typing data" sounds like keylogging. If it's what it sounds like, that's really emphatically not okay; that would include all passwords and the contents of all emails sent. Would someone with actual knowledge care to chime in and say what data is actually sent? If it turns out that Windows 10 really is sending keystrokes to…
Also, enterprise editions of Windows apparently have more opt-outs... regular editions cannot opt out of all data collection. (sorry, can't find the page that I read this on)
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Every company that has access to your encryption keys can be prompted to give them up with a warrant. You can keep them from having the key. That's one way around it. Using hardware of some kind (and there are multiple.) You are also free to use another solution that might meet your strict requirements to personally review the encryption, filesystem, device driver, and memory management code of your operating system…
I'm not talking about encryption keys. I'm talking about the data itself. Sitting on my harddrive, as it is. As I understand it microsoft is saying that they could siphon data from my computer if they deemed it necessary. Maybe that's an adversarial reading of their privacy statement[1]. But it clearly speaks of accessing files in private folders. [1]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement/default.asp...
Are they going to reach out over the internet and take your data? No. They are not going to do that. I follow this stuff really closely. I promise I haven't seen or heard of a capability where they can remotely take data from your machine and turn it over to the government.
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> and why is it on by default? Because Cortana would be useless without it and that's a big user-facing feature of Windows 10.
Something like Cortana could have been built to work locally, using your own resources. But it wasn't. This was an opportunity to say "we're not like Siri and Google Now, we respect your privacy", but instead they built something just like them.
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See http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2015/07/29/wind-nos/ ; "Windows 10 automatically encrypts the drive its installed on and generates a BitLocker recovery key. That’s backed up to your OneDrive account." Together with the ToS: "We will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), when we have a good…
OK. What I'm trying to say is that backing up to OneDrive is optional. You get the choice. You can protect the key with a TPM or a smart card...It's not an all or nothing thing. You have options there, if you are interested. The other thing is that it sounds like a lot of privacy minded people can't trust BitLocker despite any number of assurances from MS or code reviews by third parties. AND THAT'S OK. Use something…
This goes along with the news that Windows 10 backs up your drive encryption key by default, and that Microsoft can use it to decrypt your data. In "good faith", of course.
For most users, this protects them to a useful level. Most users don't think losing a password is a big deal and would be very upset to learn their data is lost because they forgot. That's an anti-feature. The number of people that'll be protected from leaving their laptop in a taxi, or home burglary, or selling/trading-in a device, or just snoopy relatives or acquaintances, etc. is large and MS absolutely made the r…
"Would you like to store a backup for your drive encryption password on Microsoft OneDrive? If you choose not to do so, and you forget your password, all of your data will be lost. [Yes/No]"
And none of that warrants a ToS that says they can use that backup for anything other than helping you recover your data.
> Also, if they use OneDrive to back stuff up (like they should!), the security damage is already done as most juicy files will be unencrypted in MS's hosting and still subject to warrants.
Hence why client-side-encrypted backups are a good idea.
I dont' know why so many people are surprised by the Cortana data vacuum. Doesn't Siri send everything you say to it to Apple or a "trusted partner"? Why would Cortana be any different? The keylogger and Start menu ads are just creepy though. I shouldn't have to opt-out of targeted ads INSIDE MY OS.
MS seems in the mindset "Can't beat 'em, join 'em" as we're only In-App Purchases away from a freemium OS.
Windows is now essentially a personalized, cloud-based operating system with the primary interface as a personal assistant, so I expected to see all these things as defaults. The advanced features just couldn't work without it. I'm glad there's at least an opt-out, but I do think that Windows needs an OS-wide incognito mode, just a simple switch to record or not record data. I generally use that on my browser for whe…
Yeah there should definitely be a "Hey Cortana, off the record,..." query mode. I'm a bit conflicted now. My girls are 7 & 9 and they've been using Microsoft Accounts. With the final Win10 build having all this (none of these settings worked a few months ago), it looks like I've got a lot of reading and explaining to do for them.
Some kind of "off the record" mode would be invaluable for voice interfaces. Hell, it would be nice if there was a check box under the Google search box as well, but I imagine Google would never make it too easy to avoid their data mining. I feel like we never had the proper privacy conversation we needed to have with companies like MS, Google, Facebook, etc. I think some level of easy to use yet strict segregation between what I consider my public life and my private life should be cooked-in, and enabled by default, into all this software.