I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10 • Hacker News Board

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#321

Post by bittercynic » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 10:02 PM UTC

ManFromUranus wrote: post #279

batou wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely no one wanted it. No one asked for it. We were spun a load of marketing disguised as listening and attention. This turned out to be exactly what Microsoft wanted which was another aggressive move against customers both business and consumer. Despite all this the noise and confusion and dubious love for the products is shining out of the arses of every non technical news source. What did we expect? I've lef…

You were always free to not use new MS operating systems. Nobody forced you to make any MS accounts or use Window 8,10 or whatever, so if you installed Windows 8 and didn't like it, that doesn't make MS evil, just don't use it. Anyone who inclined to use CentOS as their daily driver probably was never going to like MS OS's anyway. You probably only ever installed it just to find out what you hate about it.

The argument "Don't use it if you don't like it." certainly applies to many things, but when a company gets to the scale of Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc, the context is not the same. It seems reasonable to hold these behemoths to a higher standard than scrappy startups.

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#322

Post by zeidrich » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 10:09 PM UTC

api wrote: post #195

vlunkr wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The advanced features just couldn't work without it." I don't know much about Windows 10, so I'm curious what features you are referring to that require heavy tracking like this.

We had speech recognition back in the 1990s on computers less powerful than a Raspberry Pi V1. We're talking 200-400mhz 32-bit Intel boxes. So yes, the cloud dependency is very dubious. If leveraging a lot of data allows for better speech recognition, why can't your computer access a remote speech recognition data set that stores and shares the results of its machine learning algorithms rather than uploading actual a…

Does it say that it will send actual audio data?

I mean more of my problem has to do with the fact that it's an open door than what they will actually do. It doesn't say they will send audio data, it at most says "associated input data" which for all I know could be a database from their algorithms, or it could be a live 24/7 stream from my webcam and audio device.

I guess the thing is that some things are not acceptable, and whether there's a disclaimer or not, people aren't going to like it if we find out that all of our audio is being recorded and uploaded to Microsoft. But it's not, not as far as anyone can tell yet.

But again, we're only worried because they're what, giving us the option to opt out? I mean, if they wanted to they could just go ahead and stick somewhere in the privacy policy something like "from time to time microsoft will upload certain input data for improvement of service quality, depersonalized information may be sent to partners." down in paragraph 24.c.iii. Or they could just not mention it at all.

The question is are you willing to trust the OS. I mean, hell, Ubuntu Linux went and sent all of your search information to Amazon without even giving you the option to opt out in the install process at one point. It could be disabled, but unless you knew about it in advance there was no option to do so. And Ubuntu is open source.

I can see use cases for it, and one actually ties into the location services. Say you're from a region with a specific accent. If the system can tell how you speak, and how other people speak around you, it might be able to create an accent subset for you based on the collective data from all of those speakers. It might be able to guess from a few sentences and your location that you're Glaswegian and start to understand you, not because you trained it, but because across the region many people have trained it a bit. Then with the location to tie the regional accent together, even if you're in the US once you've spoken a few phrases it might be able to identify you as belonging to that regional language group.

But uploading of all spoken data to Microsoft would be silly, not just because it would piss people off, but because it wouldn't be something you could hide, and it would end up being quite a lot of data that's really not that useful.

But could it be possible? Sure. But they could also do it without tipping you off or giving you the ability to opt out.

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#323

Post by bhauer » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 10:12 PM UTC

freehunter wrote: post #220

bhauer wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy it. My Windows 10 machines will be Ivy Bridge, Broadwell, and soon Skylake-powered desktop processors running with gobs of excess computing capacity. Voice recognition should be feasible with this hardware, as it has been in the past with Windows 7 and Windows 8's often-ignored voice transcription feature. Furthermore, even if the performance were slightly worse, I would gladly sacrifice some performance…

You know they sell things like the Surface 3 using an Intel i3 processor, and still sell Windows tablets with Atom processors, right? Just because you have a 12-core i7 with 320GB of RAM doesn't mean every Windows machine does.

Well, like I said, Windows 7 and 8 had voice transcription support built-in and it worked well on my old computers from 2009, with plenty of CPU capacity to spare. I expect a modern i3 would probably match my desktop i7 from '09.

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#324

Post by bhauer » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 10:13 PM UTC

sudioStudio64 wrote: post #276

bhauer wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy it. My Windows 10 machines will be Ivy Bridge, Broadwell, and soon Skylake-powered desktop processors running with gobs of excess computing capacity. Voice recognition should be feasible with this hardware, as it has been in the past with Windows 7 and Windows 8's often-ignored voice transcription feature. Furthermore, even if the performance were slightly worse, I would gladly sacrifice some performance…

It actually does run locally with access to API's that you authorize. Just saying...

Interesting. Is it easy to "firewall" Cortana so that it does local voice processing and connects only to external services you authorize?

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#325

Post by zeidrich » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 10:14 PM UTC

api wrote: post #249

thwest wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you remember how much training time you had to spend on Dragon Naturally Speaking?

... on a Pentium I, using 1990s machine learning algorithms, sure. Nobody's answered my question as to why The Cloud is the magic pixie dust that solves this problem, and why it could not be solved locally with modern compute power and modern ML techniques.

Because many people speak similarly. If a number of people who speak similarly can train it, it can learn how you will say words that you haven't even said to it yet if a number of other people already have.

Machine learning algorithms haven't changed that much since the 90s, what's changed is the amount of data we have access to, and the amount of data we can process.

When you're training it yourself the data is what's limited. The fact that we can process more data doesn't matter if we don't have access to more data because you can't speak any faster.

But if you have millions of people speaking to it, then we can take advantage of the fact that we can process so much more data.

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#326

Post by Dylan16807 » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 10:19 PM UTC

ctdonath wrote: post #292

scholia wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not actually true. Windows 10 is not free, and Microsoft is not giving away the operating system. What Microsoft is doing is giving consumers a free upgrade on Win7/8 PCs where the operating system has already been paid for. This is basically the strategy already used by Apple and Google (Android): once you have bought the OS (bundled with the hardware) then you get updates free.

Except that Apple makes its money off hardware sales, and Google makes money off data mining ... for both, the operating system is just a means to an end, a cost center required to support the separate profit centers. Microsoft is, however, has the OS as its primary product.

Doesn't matter. They make all their consumer money off of OEMs.

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#327

Post by theli0nheart » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 10:21 PM UTC

twerkmonsta wrote: post #274

ArtDev wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook does for status messages: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131215/23260825572/faceb...

Again, logging my keystrokes in a single text input field is vastly different from logging all of my keystrokes across the board.

For a lot of people, Facebook is the board.

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#328

Post by Dylan16807 » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 10:23 PM UTC

slg wrote: post #96

debacle wrote: post #69

This is more of a rhetorical question, but why does every modern OS and browser need to try and become a computing leviathan? Why can't my hammer ever be happy just driving nails? I don't need a hammer that cooks waffles.

I'll answer your rhetorical question with another one. When was the last time you paid for an upgraded hammer?

As far as I can tell the main thing pushing people to pay to upgrade windows is when support runs out, not a desire for features.

Far more people never consider it and just let their new faster computer have a different OS.

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#329

Post by fencepost » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 10:24 PM UTC

pmelendez wrote: post #270

TeMPOraL wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had better results in late 2000s with less than an hour of training MS Speech API than I have with Google Now today. Either off-line speech recognition isn't that bad or my English really sucks.

I don't know about Google Now. But Cortana does have way better results than local MS Speech API. My english does suck, so it is very impressive to me that Cortana got me right most of the time.

Maybe I'm not using it right, but Cortana on my Lumia 640 Windows Phone seems to blow Google Now right out of the water in terms of capability and usability except for punctuation in voice recognition.

On the other hand, generally I'm pretty impressed with just the voice recognition/transcription by Google on my Android phones (exception: "ferociously"). Transcriptions in Google Voice on the other hand are, hm, marginally good enough to often get a general gist of a call before I return it, but if I need the actual details of the message there's no choice but to listen to it. This includes calls made by me, from my phone that I also do voice recognition on, into a Google Voice number that I use for some tracking.

It is interesting that the transcriptions in the web interface show how confident they are of the quality for each word by how dark the word is.

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#330

Post by Dylan16807 » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 10:27 PM UTC

sudioStudio64 wrote: post #95

JoshTriplett wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two approaches: give someone a pile of power over you and trust them not to abuse it, or never give them that power in the first place. Given the repeated demonstrations of what can and does go wrong with the former...

Those aren't even remotely the only two choices here. There have never been more options for an end user of technology. You don't have to use agree to it. It's a trade off. If you have different requirements they are more than willing to come up with a different arrangement with you. (Yes, for a fee.) They aren't the government. They are an overblown bubble gum factory. It's up to you if you chew or not. And there ha…

What kind of fee do you have in mind for not using their contract of adhesion? Unless I'm buying thousands of copies of the OS I doubt I can even get that negotiation started.