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Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

#71

Post by Aleman360 »

LesZedCB wrote: post #42
TeMPOraL wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. What the hell are these people thinking? That an operating system is a shopping mall?... ... and they're probably right anyway. Computing went mainstream, people who need tools and not toys are niche now, and mass market doesn't cater to niches.

And worse is that the only reason I have windows in the first place is to play games. I don't need to do anything else on it, but I have to have it in my life because big game companies will not make games for linux. Hell, I'm so excited for Oculus Rift, but at this point they have even dropped Mac support (understandably, they don't have the graphics power), so if I want to experience VR currently, I'm completely li…

Valve knows how many times you launch a game, how much time you spend in a game, who your friends are, your spending habits...

Re: Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

#72

Post by agentultra »

dantillberg wrote: post #60

I spent my holiday break shifting my alignment 2 or 3 points towards Stallmanism. The existence/collection of statistics like this increase my confidence in that choice. Between Windows privacy craziness and Apple's continuing lockdown of OSX (I think that System Integrity Protection augurs an iOS-like walled-garden future for OSX), I recently switched all of my OSX/Windows/Ubuntu systems to Arch Linux; it takes some…

I went the other way around. I started with your conclusions and have been migrating to the Apple ecosystem and am tempted to move to Windows. I had become tired of the dearth of issues that crop up to maintain an Arch desktop distribution.

While the privacy collection issues should be addressed and be transparent to end-users I think open source is not the way to go for these devices. I'm tired of each device being an island. I like handing off calls from my phone to my laptop when I'm at work. It began frustrating me years ago when I couldn't just flick a few files off of my e-reader to a friend's phone despite the prevalence of available networks.

Open-source, meanwhile, has struggled to provide a basic desktop environment to rival the best from five years ago. It's simply too much work without a paid, focused, and highly-skilled product team consisting of more than just developers. And they're still fighting the chicken-and-egg problem of user-adoption.

I don't like the spyware "features," but I don't think I'll be going back to Linux any time soon and giving up all the great software I've come to depend on.

I'm hopeful that people will find ways to invest in its development and find a way to introduce a competing product that is both secure, in the control of the user, and a delight to use -- able to integrate with a plethora of devices and, for the most part, just work.

Re: Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

#73

Post by caskance »

MikeNomad wrote: post #19
caskance wrote: post #12

This is an insanely stupid title for an article that is essentially blogspam.

Would, "Microsoft Reveals Details Collected Through Windows 10 Tracking" be more appropriate?

It would still be a preposterous mischaracterization of what happened.

Re: Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

#74

Post by caskance »

dantillberg wrote: post #60

I spent my holiday break shifting my alignment 2 or 3 points towards Stallmanism. The existence/collection of statistics like this increase my confidence in that choice. Between Windows privacy craziness and Apple's continuing lockdown of OSX (I think that System Integrity Protection augurs an iOS-like walled-garden future for OSX), I recently switched all of my OSX/Windows/Ubuntu systems to Arch Linux; it takes some…

Complain about the feature all you want, but pretending that it's not well documented or configurable is just silly.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt577208(v=vs.85...

Re: Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

#75

Post by caskance »

lewisl9029 wrote: post #64

I still can't imagine why Microsoft would think it's worth the bad publicity to not offer the option to disable telemetry, considering how few people tend to deviate from defaults in general, and how tiny a percentage of their users even care about privacy to begin with (evident from the commercial success of Windows 10). They've been getting so much goodwill for all the other great things they've been doing lately.…

They do offer those options. People would just rather complain that the free upgrade they got doesn't have features they want - but apparently not enough to actually pay for them.

Re: Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

#76

Post by caskance »

AlexandrB wrote: post #48
skrebbel wrote: post #41

I fully agree with the complaints, but I never understood why this outrage doesn't happen about e.g. Gmail (or all of ChromeOS for that matter). Lots of people virtually live in Google Apps, which certainly does a lot more tracking than Windows 10 does. The argument that "it's OK because it's on the web" just doesn't cut it anymore guys. An application is an application. We should just be as angry about browsers that…

I'm not happy about Gmail tracking, but the information Gmail has access to is limited to what ends up in that email account. An OS's access is potentially everything on the computer. To me, privacy is about control (deciding who gets to see what) and having an OS that phones home with who knows what information means I have no control once information touches my PC.

Anyone who cares to look it up knows.

Of course, there's always the chance that Microsoft is lying in their documentation, but if you mistrust them that much, you probably shouldn't use their software even if they claim to not collect any information.

Re: Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

#77

Post by unprepare »

Aleman360 wrote: post #71
LesZedCB wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And worse is that the only reason I have windows in the first place is to play games. I don't need to do anything else on it, but I have to have it in my life because big game companies will not make games for linux. Hell, I'm so excited for Oculus Rift, but at this point they have even dropped Mac support (understandably, they don't have the graphics power), so if I want to experience VR currently, I'm completely li…

Valve knows how many times you launch a game, how much time you spend in a game, who your friends are, your spending habits...

How many games are exclusive to Steam and how many games are exclusive to windows?

Re: Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

#78

Post by codingdave »

This is the one that worries me -- "More than four billion hours spent playing PC games"

Tracking usage in Microsoft's own software is one thing. But for the OS to understand which 3rd party apps are games, and track hours spent on them has some deeper implications.

Re: Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

#79

Post by lewisl9029 »

caskance wrote: post #75
lewisl9029 wrote: post #64

I still can't imagine why Microsoft would think it's worth the bad publicity to not offer the option to disable telemetry, considering how few people tend to deviate from defaults in general, and how tiny a percentage of their users even care about privacy to begin with (evident from the commercial success of Windows 10). They've been getting so much goodwill for all the other great things they've been doing lately.…

They do offer those options. People would just rather complain that the free upgrade they got doesn't have features they want - but apparently not enough to actually pay for them.

I assume you mean the Enterprise version? Last time I checked that wasn't something individual consumers can just go out and buy.

But regardless of that, from Microsoft's perspective, does it make any sense to not offer the option to disable telemetry on all versions? From what I see, all it's doing is giving them bad publicity while driving potential users away to other platforms. And for what? Probably a few basis points in telemetry data that won't even make a dent to the overall trends in their telemetry data.

Re: Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

#80

Post by sdegutis »

dantillberg wrote: post #60

I spent my holiday break shifting my alignment 2 or 3 points towards Stallmanism. The existence/collection of statistics like this increase my confidence in that choice. Between Windows privacy craziness and Apple's continuing lockdown of OSX (I think that System Integrity Protection augurs an iOS-like walled-garden future for OSX), I recently switched all of my OSX/Windows/Ubuntu systems to Arch Linux; it takes some…

I've been trying to switch to (Arch) Linux -- away from OS X -- for a few years now, with no luck. Mostly because the only hardware I have is Apple hardware, which is notorious to get working with Linux drivers as good as it is with built-in Apple drivers. That's the main thing stopping me from making the full switch. And using Linux inside a VM isn't ideal either, it's kind of the worst of both worlds.
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