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

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#521

Post by Sirenos » Fri, Jul 31, 2015, 12:58 PM UTC

ewzimm wrote: post #278

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.

Skepticism of heavy tracking is absolutely justified, so I want to address that first. I've read Richard Stallman's blog for the last 15 years, and he has had a lot of good thoughts about it. I think everyone should have access to privacy, but I don't think everything should be private. Games are a good example. Nobody would expect a baseball player to object to tracking statistics. That's a big part of what makes th…

> Personalized deep learning is an attempt to create a relatively neutral arbiter of all this information, distill it into something useful based not only on the user's behavior but also the aggregate of everyone's behavior. The algorithms don't just learn from what you like but have the potential to uncover interests and information that you might never be able to access outside your bubble.

That's an interesting statement considering how most recommender systems tend to suggest things related to your interests, further keeping you within the confines of your bubble. How is Cortana different?

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#522

Post by gambiter » Fri, Jul 31, 2015, 1:03 PM UTC

_rob wrote: post #302

gambiter wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize the 'personal assistant' functionality of today is slightly more complex than just speech recognition, right? Because, it is.

Can you give me an example? And why not have all the features that can be done locally be done locally. If it's possible for my computer to understand me entering an apportionment, why should that go to a MS sever to be stored forever?

How do you think your computer can understand 'entering an appointment'?

There's a lot more that goes into understanding than JUST speech recognition. First of all, speech recognition by itself isn't exactly trivial, and that's become more and more obvious as we've seen the smallest accent mess with the digital assistants on all the major phones. Yes, technically, Dragon Naturally Speaking existed a decade ago and worked somewhat, but needed a LOT of training, and was dumb as a brick. It doesn't compare.

But beyond that, understanding the meaning of the spoken word is difficult too. Yes, NLTs exist, and they can be very good, but you really need something that a team is administering. They can identify pain points and do regular updates to help... things like an odd band name that is ALWAYS misunderstood, some odd combination of words that confuses a question with a 911 call, etc., otherwise you're just going to end up frustrated.

I should also mention that a digital assistant really needs the power of a full search engine behind it. This allows for auto-correction of mispronounced words, but it also allows near-instant lookups for relevant information. If this was running on your local machine, not only will the processing be slow for some things, it will also be more limited in it's ability to fully process all possible meanings, and it will need to be updated CONSTANTLY.

These companies, by putting the language processing in the cloud, are throwing teams and hardware at the problem, and yet they STILL have embarrassing difficulties when it comes to actually understanding sometimes. Consider that for a moment... hundreds, even thousands of servers running the latest software for processing natural language for multi-millions of people aren't capable of getting your meaning 100% of the time.

Incidentally, I realize that there some open source projects out there that do some rudimentary voice recognition and processing, however they suffer from the same issues addressed above and are MUCH more limited in many many ways. Many of them still make use of cloud-based services for processing the audio, btw. The one advantage, I will say, is that you have to ability to add your own custom commands and actions, which the major systems obviously don't allow.

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#523

Post by pmelendez » Fri, Jul 31, 2015, 1:29 PM UTC

Sir_Substance wrote: post #477

mynameisvlad wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's multiple gigabytes for a single language and accent . I wasn't even talking about the full dataset across languages. You don't seem to understand the size requirements for getting a good dataset. Don't you think Microsoft would have loaded up the dataset if it was easy and cheap? They didn't have a desktop cloud-based recognition service until literally yesterday, so they had many, many years to include this mag…

>It's multiple gigabytes for a single language and accent. I have 602 GB free on my first hard drive, 519 free on my second, 699 on my third, 1.06TB free on my forth, 405GB free on my fifth and 46 free on my 6th. If Microsoft would be kind enough to release it to me, I think I can probably find a corner to squeeze it into. >Don't you think Microsoft would have loaded up the dataset if it was easy and cheap? No, I don…

> That dataset contains languages and accents that are not relevant to me.

You are assuming that they have a different model for each language and region, which I don't think is true since Cortana understand my foreign accent besides of being using USA as a region (Canadian version works really well too).

> I have 602 GB free on my first hard drive, 519 free on my second, 699 on my third, 1.06TB free on my forth, 405GB free on my fifth and 46 free on my 6th.

Good for you, but I don't have that many free space. Gee, I only have 20Gb free on my laptop. I think you might be bias about your situation but not everyone has +1Tb of free space waiting to be used for a voice command.

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#524

Post by Grue3 » Fri, Jul 31, 2015, 1:32 PM UTC

ewzimm wrote: post #20

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…

>I expected to see all these things as defaults

Really? You expected what is basically a built-in keylogger?

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#525

Post by saiya-jin » Fri, Jul 31, 2015, 1:36 PM UTC

moron4hire wrote: post #158

rifung wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excuse me if I just don't fully comprehend your argument, but isn't FOSS an orthogonal issue to this? After all, even if software is open source, that doesn't stop it from mining your data. You just know that they are doing so. I suppose you can remove that feature, but it seems you're also able to disable the features here as well. In any case, I'm all for FOSS but it doesn't seem to be a solution to this problem, w…

Yes, I agree that it's not really a problem for everyone. The issue isn't actually privacy. The issue is "find a reason to bash on MS for this month". Now, I think the incentive structures for FOSS projects are a little different such that the FOSS environment isn't going to converge on the idea of collecting such data. But clearly, throw any sort of system that wants to make money into the mix, coupled with the fact…

apple and google are scumbag corporations (not only) when it comes to privacy... so is it OK if another big corp joins them? you basically say yes, I say NO.

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#526

Post by saiya-jin » Fri, Jul 31, 2015, 1:38 PM UTC

ergest wrote: post #252

I'm sticking with Windows 7 until Windows 15

you mean the next version after 10, when they get things right again? nah, I'll skip to version 23, or 42 to be sure (but they might screw their new feces sampling API to be little too intrusive for my taste...)

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#527

Post by pdabbadabba » Fri, Jul 31, 2015, 1:49 PM UTC

Sir_Substance wrote: post #478

pdabbadabba wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a clear moral distinction to be drawn between people who use Windows 10 knowing that it might be sharing some data with Microsoft, so its algorithms can streamline certain everyday tasks and those who maliciously upload their exes' sex tapes to the Internet without their consent. There are huge differences here on at least three crucial dimensions: intent of the sharer, the audience with whom it is shared, a…

This is specifically in the context of your windows 10 install uploading data about me , without you asking me if that's ok. My wifi password over wifi sense, for example.

Yes. I understand that this is about "my" Windows 10 install sharing data about "you." I should have been more clear (and, unfortunately, the editing window has closed so I can't clarify). But if you re-read my comment with this in mind (as I had intended) it remains the case that while this a Bad Thing, and I see the analogy to revenge porn, it also is radically different in degree from revenge porn on several morally significant dimensions.

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#528

Post by saint_fiasco » Fri, Jul 31, 2015, 1:50 PM UTC

mondoshawan wrote: post #411

bittercynic wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This argument is specious at best. We must hold all parties involved to the same level of standard as any, at all levels because a breach of trust at any size is seriously damaging to the consumer. It doesn't matter about the size of the Corp.

I think it matters, if only because it's more efficient to complain about the big corporations that everyone is familiar with than about some unknown startup few people care about.

If you only have limited time and energy for activism, you have to go for the bigger targets (to make it easy to collaborate with other activists) or go for the most local targets (because you may have a comparative advantage).

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#529

Post by saiya-jin » Fri, Jul 31, 2015, 1:55 PM UTC

wambotron wrote: post #303

dimino wrote: post #107

I'll bet everything in my pocket that Windows 10 does not keylog every stroke and send it back to Microsoft servers for storage. It's intellectually dishonest to think that's what s going on, because it ruins the conversation about what they're actually doing.

There's a ton of fear-mongering going on in these comments. It's depressing.

there is a lot of pissed off people who are seeing their desktop/notebook OS of choice (for whatever reasons, be it work, gaming etc.) fall into same old bullsh*t category that scumbags from Apple and Google went into (yes, privacy stuff, nothing more, nothing less). by having these on by default, or not changeable in simpler versions of OS at all, effectively most of the planet will get surveillance build in.

Err, no, thank you. Every single system/cloud is hackable, and given enough time, it will get hacked. I think plenty of proofs around us. Tell me, why should I be OK with this? I don't want their tiny functional enhancements for this price. In fact, i don't want them at all. I am never commanding my computer by voice, as is neither 99% of computer users (not only because english isn't their native language), and I see nothing cool nor interesting in it (just one example out of many).

personally, sticking to Win 7 till games will work on them. and if i move, i am pretty sure there will be completely disconnected offline cracked version, if the rest of the system will actually be worth it.

i had the impression lately Microsoft is doing some properly good stuff, but this showed that no, they are just same scumbags as they were 20 years ago, when they gave many people plenty of reasons to hate them. Methods and situations changed a bit, not so much questionable morals.

Re: I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10

#530

Post by talmand » Fri, Jul 31, 2015, 2:15 PM UTC

fuzzywalrus wrote: post #113

talmand wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, to be fair, they spy on you but just don't sell the data. Yet.

Define spying? Most of Apple's services are opt-in as opposed to opt-out. iTunes and Siri are where most the data collection happens. In OS you also have device location services, map data collection but most points are easily controlled.

Well, the innocent definition is to keep watch over and the sinister definition requires hostile intent. Either way, it can be considered spying. The problem is that the innocent spying today can easily turn into hostile spying tomorrow, with little or no notice.