With Windows 10, Microsoft Disregards User Choice and Privacy

Some highlights:

  Microsoft installed an app in users’ system trays advertising
  the free upgrade to Windows 10.

  Not satisfied, the company eventually made Windows 10 a
  recommended update so users receiving critical security updates
  were now also downloading an entirely new operating system onto
  their machines without their knowledge.

This is essentially equivalent to saying: You've been running whatever version of Windows, but we'll trick you into installing Windows 10.

  Specifically, when prompted with a Windows 10 update, if the
  user chose to decline it by hitting the ‘X’ in the upper right
  hand corner, Microsoft interpreted that as consent to download
  Windows 10.

The previous trick didn't work on all of you, so we'll go on to change the default behavior of our dialog boxes in order to trick you into installing Windows 10.

  By default, Windows 10 sends an unprecedented amount of usage
  data back to Microsoft, and the company claims most of it is to
  “personalize” the software by feeding it to the OS assistant
  called Cortana.

  And while users can opt-out of some of these settings, it is
  not a guarantee that your computer will stop talking to
  Microsoft’s servers.

This probably explains it all.

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Microsoft appears to have learnt a lot from LinkedIn [0].

[0] https://twitter.com/darylginn/status/590664399041519617

Not sure what else has changed, but the changes in personalization (including Cortana) and telemetry changes warrant that it be called a new version.

With LinkedIn in it's arsenal, Microsoft now wants to surpass Google in the amount of user information that can be collected.

I would argue that no, it's not an assumption of malicious intent, it's an assumption that Microsoft will not keep this data private and contained. It will leak, either to governments (which Microsoft has time and time again helped without a question of whether they should) or to other non-scrupulous actors.

I think this slightly understates just how sleazy Microsoft were about it, if anything. Before the dialog that interpreted closing it with the X in the corner as agreement to install Windows 10, they rolled out a similar-looking dialog where that was the only way to avoid install Windows 10 - clicking on any of the buttons in the dialog would cause it to be installed.

I certainly agree that Microsoft have been very underhanded in some of their approaches.

What really grinds my gears though is the lack of interest people have in maintaining their tools. If your computer is central to running your business you should be informed about upcoming updates as computer downtime is a threat to your business.