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I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

jonathan.porta.codes

361–370 of 596 posts

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#361
post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You can actually customize a large part of it and turn all of it off.

You can't firewall it off, but you can learn how it actually works and just turn it off.

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We have voice recognition since at least late 90's but you have to spend long hours training Microsoft could ship their pre-trained dataset with the computer, or make it available as a download. They choose not to.

gok covered this fairly well in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9978755 It's a big, really big dataset, and things get far better the more data you have. In order to even have it, let alone keep it up to date, a significant amount of space and memory would be needed.

That dataset contains languages and accents that are not relevant to me. It could easily be culled to a size where it's no compromise on language+region of birth alone.

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#364
post #305

I find it shocking how people readily accept Google's far worse policies, and yet are so concerned about an easy opt out. For instance, in Android, Google tracks with GPS accuracy your whereabouts constantly. This isn't just what IP your desktop is attached to. Furthermore, there is no prompt telling you this happens with a very easy way of undoing. In fact even if you knew about this it is very hard to find a way to…

This is completely false. For one thing, SRWare Iron is a scam: http://www.insanitybit.com/2012/06/23/srware-iron-browser-a-... For another thing, Chrome doesn't log every website you visit. The closest thing they do is suggest autocompletions for searches/URLs you type in the URL, which is a straightforwardly-explained checkbox in Chrome's privacy settings.

> Chrome doesn't log every website you visit

But it does. If you get a new android phone and log in with a google account then it updates your browser history on chrome. Which could only be done if your non-incognito history is stored in google's servers.

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#365

I find it shocking how people readily accept Google's far worse policies, and yet are so concerned about an easy opt out. For instance, in Android, Google tracks with GPS accuracy your whereabouts constantly. This isn't just what IP your desktop is attached to. Furthermore, there is no prompt telling you this happens with a very easy way of undoing. In fact even if you knew about this it is very hard to find a way to…

> I find it shocking how people readily accept Google's far worse policies, and yet are so concerned about an easy opt out.

For me it's because I control my interaction with Google. I don't use their search for things I don't want them recording, I don't use gmail for conversations I expect to be private. Once your talking about the private files I store on my hard drive and access with the OS, the keystrokes I enter on my keyboard for every application, then the reach is far greater. Having a company like Google say "You can use these services, but we're going to spy on you" is not the same as MS saying "we will be watching and have access to everything on your computer, oh and you can't disable all of this spying without an enterprise license."

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't MS closer to Apple than Google in terms of how it makes money? You pay directly for all or most of its stuff. Also, I thought Google sold your eyeballs to advertisers but not your data nor how it figured that it were your eyeballs that were most fit for the ad. (I guess for some ads, the very fact that it thought your eyeballs were fit for them already discloses more about you than you'd like... and I'd guess t…

Microsoft has Bing and their own advertising platform, with a tight partnership with Yahoo. Bing is now tightly integrated within Windows since version 8, ads and all. It's really irrelevant how much money Microsoft makes from this when they are in the same business. Also, I interacted with Google's AdX and others and I must say that Google's AdX is much more restrictive in the user data exposed. The identifiers they…

Wasn't Bing Ads just sold to AOL a month ago?

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#368
post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually in the UK it is covered by the Data Protection Act. Interesting times ahead. If you knowingly or unknowningly give personal information away without my consent this is illegal.

I would challenge you to show something conclusive that states that I am forbidden by law from stating "I know this person. His name is batou." while pointing at you.

That's fine. That's no different to an IP address or a DNS record or something that you'd put on an envelope. That is public information.

The content of our communications is the matter under consideration i.e the content of the envelope.

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#369
post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm actually not free to not use it. I have to test our product on these systems and therefore I will need at least a virtual machine instance of it. I have no option not to use a Microsoft account because the majority of the functionality has shifted to behind the privacy wall. Actually I installed it to test our desktop windows product against it as well as our web application in Edge. This was a decider for us: do…

That's pretty specious. Your work requires you to use it. So presumably you'll only be testing on your VM instance. And if you are using at work, then use the Enterprise version, which doesn't use a Microsoft account whatsoever. And lets you control all of these privacy concerns, including telemetry. You bitching that your job requires you to test a product against Windows in a VM is not the same as Microsoft holding…

I assure you this is not specious.

We have to test against the lowest common denominator so we're not using Enterprise or VL for this nor are the machines domain members.

The privacy policy changes violate our network AUP, security policy and compliance with a number of regulations. We handle confidential financial, insurance and medical data.

That's where the catch-22 is. There is no possiblity for us to use this and remain in compliance.

Not only that, every version of windows since 8 has called home. There is a lot of traffic outgoing from our network we block from machines. And that is with a heavily locked down GPO and custom WIM deployment.

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#370
post #341
post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... 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.

There are several tremendous advantages to server-based speech recognition. Firstly, the models (particularly the language models) needed for state of the art performance are huge. It's not atypical for papers to discuss using a billion n-grams, for example ( https://wiki.inf.ed.ac.uk/twiki/pub/CSTR/ListenTerm1201415/s... ). That's several gigabytes of memory and storage at the very least, and you'd need a copy of th…

Good speech recognition is that expensive?

... and people think sentient AI is on the horizon. :P

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