The first sentence of the article is "Microsoft has published the full range of data that Windows 10 version 1703, the Creators Update, will collect in its default "basic" telemetry setting." They provided all the info they collect in the default mode, the title only says "most" because they didn't give a complete list for what they collect in the opt-in "Full" telemetry mode.
They could tell us they're telling us everything and just be lying. Why does it have to be hidden at all? And why not let people turn it all off? Then everyone would stop talking about it.
This is what I don't get. For as many reasons as they have to justify telemetry, it can't be worth the damage to their image of refusing to allow a disable setting. Especially since the vast majority of users will not disable it anyways.
Oh, I don't really know, but I gather they are gambling that the data & ad sales will eclipse any potential losses in marketshare. Their hubris, and duopoly position, leads me to presume they are going to profit in the short-term, at least.
I doubt they care about their image. Microsoft has traditionally acted in a very monopolistic - sometimes almost solipsistic - manner. In recent years they've broadened their approach a bit, but NIH syndrome is going to be a key part of their culture for a long time.
They may not have even considered that "telemetry" might hurt their image (or profits). Even on HN we regularly see people complaining that they cannot switch to a different OS. Technical solutions sometimes help but MS probably assumes that most people will submit to the lockin. Image doesn't matter when most people are tied to the platform. When games are enough to tie people to Windows, MS can do whatever they want.
I disagree. I don't think you need to like Microsoft to notice they are investing heavily in initiatives designed to repair their historical reputation.
I'm a perfect example of this being the case. I'm a .NET developer by trade and I have very few complaints about it, but I only run Windows as a VM at home because I don't want it anywhere near my personal life.
If I understand the article correctly, they are publishing all they are collecting by default.
They are not publishing exactly what they are collecting for the "Full" telemetry setting, which is opt-in. I'm guessing they don't want to commit to that because they want to be free to add and remove metrics they're interested in.
Yeh, I'm sorry, I missed that. My point is perhaps only even stronger though, considering the new default is "Full".
To their minimal credit, I suppose, you can no longer avoid the toggle when installing or upgrading to the Creators Update, which you could do in previous Windows with telemetry. I doubt that many will still bother even reading the labels of the toggles though, let alone consider whether they'd be better served with an option other than the default.
Note the Orwellian use of the word "telemetry." They are using it to mean "data collected by the telemetry team" at Microsoft.
This is not a list of "telemetry data collected by Windows 10".
I am beginning to suspect that they do not have adequate internal safeguards to control the collection of personally identifiable information across the entire company (including office, bing, skype, linkedin, etc, etc).
That would mean they are actually incapable of enumerating all the information a clean Windows 10 install and office 365 will phone home. It would also explain discrepancies between todays's list and third party audits of Windows 10.
I don't think that is true: the list includes telemetry from the Windows Store, which while a bundled part of Windows 10 I would be hugely surprised if its telemetry (which includes marketing concerns) is anywhere a part of the same "telemetry team" as say crash/error reporting telemetry.
The impression I get is that this information took so long to produce because they did have to sit down with all of the various teams involved.
They also don't seem to be attempting any Orwellian use of the word "telemetry", though it is technically explicit. They start the document by establishing the definition, if you care to question it more directly: https://technet.microsoft.com/itpro/windows/configure/config...
That reaction is exactly why many companies don't disclose this kind of thing at all. It's better to remain opaque than walk into a bad pr cycle for performing a basically good deed (increasing transparency).
This whole thread is somewhat disheartening, actually. Devs - especially ones developing against a broad hardware ecosystem - need feedback from the field to surface problems. That need must be balanced against privacy.
A golden hope would be an open standard for collection and anonymized storage of telemetry data. It's likely difficult to say exactly what is needed from one os to the next though, once you get into the technical details of what needs to be monitored for useful debugging of major subsystems... So seems far fetched.
"These improvements are unlikely to appease that minority of users that regard the mandatory telemetry as an unacceptable intrusion..."
by "minority", I assume the author means those pesky, conscientous types who prefer not to have every action disseminated for exploitation. Analytics make the world a better place, and they can be abused as spyware... it all comes down to trust. MS's history speaks for itself.
Precisely. Let's paint privacy-conscious users (read: virtually all of humanity, given the choice) as the "minority." Let's make it seem like they are just an annoying vocal minority, complaining for the sake of complaining. This is just a basic marginalization tactic. Disgusting.
Most people close the bathroom stall door before they poop. They appreciate privacy. I think a lot of non-technical people just don't understand how this relates to privacy, which is a different problem.
Thanks; this is what I was trying to say. I believe most, if not all, humans appreciate privacy and would value it over a lack of, given a clear and obvious choice.
The real problem is they are right. We are a minority. Most people don't give a damn about it. We are talking about a world in which you can lie to presidency, ridicule yourself and the entire country and still people believe in you. So privacy ? It's not even on people's radar.
People accept data collection in part because of the lengths companies go to to hide, obscure, and spin it. Those efforts wouldn't be necessary if people truly didn't care.
Peter Bright is a huge Microsoft/closed source software proponent. All of his articles are about how MS and big software companies never do bad things. He even supported Oracle in their efforts to destroy the software industry by granting copyright status to APIs.
"Storage attributes, such as number of drives, type, and size" -- So ID numbers of all USB storage drives you've connected? Better not put sensitive data on a USB and send it to a journalist...
"the number of crashes or hangs, and application state change details, such as how much processor time and memory were used, and the total uptime for an app." -- To e.g. determine when you used the TOR browser, since the difference in uptime between two time points is how much it was up during that interval.
"App usage data. Includes how an app is used, including how long an app is used, when the app has focus, and when the app is started" -- Oh, never mind, they also explicitly state they gather which apps you have installed and how much and when you use them in the next section.
"Accessory device data. Includes a list of accessory devices, such as printers or external storage devices, that are connected to Windows PCs and whether these devices will function after upgrading to a new version of the operating system." -- Print poster and glue it to a wall -> Printer gets identified via tracking dots ( https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-d... ) -> Printer is linked back to you, even if you bought it with cash. I hope you didn't print anything your local sheriff would dislike!
Edit: This is all in the 'basic' level, which you can't disable.
They mean this quite literally too, as Microsoft employees direct everyone to use the Windows Feedback app to submit feedback, and the Feedback app refuses to function without Enhanced or Full Telemetry.
So, if you don't enable at least enhanced telemetry, Microsoft does not want to hear from you, does not care about your feedback, and no Microsoft employee will respond to your query on the matter.
I've tried to engage the Windows Insider folks over a couple different mediums, as far as I can tell they're barred from talking to anyone who even mentions telemetry.
De-anonymization is incredibly easy (bordering on trivial) with any rich data set. For example, 87% of the US population is uniquely identifiable by their combination of DoB, zip code, and sex [1]. The richer a dataset is, the easier it is to de-anonymize. This is a pretty rich dataset.
hey don't go against the Google = Good, Microsoft = Evil circlejerk. Google is trendy and half the users here want to work there so there's no way they could do anything bad
> If your organization relies on Windows Update for updates, you shouldn’t use the Security level. Because no Windows Update information is gathered at this level, important information about update failures is not sent. Microsoft uses this information to fix the causes of those failures and improve the quality of our updates.
Note that they don't tell you which of the other levels enables Windows Update telemetry, which is apparently helpful.
That's simply not true. Telemetry is not required to update Windows. I've had it disabled for nearly 2 years now with Shutup10 and my OS updates just fine.
That's just a single datapoint, but Shutup10 and other similar programs are very popular. If it broke updates people would be making noise about it.
This is awful, but if you use a smartphone, this is about the same telemetry that has been collected on you for years. Microsoft is just keeping up with the times.
One difference being that seriously privacy-sensitive or -critical smartphone users can avoid using Google's services on their phone and create a firewall whitelist, or a filtering loopback VPN, to avoid leakage.[0]
Not that's ideal, but it seems a lot better than Windows 10 seemingly indefatigible ways and means of sneaking data out. Ignoring hosts file and DNS responses is just rude.
[0] baseband attacks are still a problem, but at that level of threat then the BIOS or management subsystem on your PC isn't trustworthy either.
"avoid using Google's services" implies using an Android build that doesn't include Google Play Services, which means you're probably going to have to download and flash it yourself. If you're willing and able to do that, you can probably handle using Linux on your desktop, which is the analogous alternative on the PC.
I agree entirely, and I'm not happy with the current state of the smartphone landscape, but I was trying to illustrate the difference between 'user hostility' in Android, for example, and downright 'user evasion' in Win 10.
Not that I think Android is on a good trajectory in terms of user control, but hopefully alternatives such as Sailfish gain traction.
Just because you can handle it doesn't mean you want to, instead of lazily paying a company to worry about it for you. Of course, OSX is the more popular choice for that set. I wonder why...
I disagree with this completely. It's drastically easier to control the network environment on a desktop platform, where it goes through routers and/or firewalls to get out to the Internet in most cases, and as you can be an admin on the PC and tamper with the OS enough to block it.
On the other hand, most mobile devices have locked bootloaders, actively work to prevent giving the owner root access, and speak directly out to the Internet using proprietary networking modules.
> > "the number of crashes or hangs, and application state change details, such as how much processor time and memory were used, and the total uptime for an app."
> To e.g. determine when you used the TOR browser, since the difference in uptime between two time points is how much it was up during that interval.
Having personally talked with Microsoft engineers who handle what this data is used for, I can tell you they take PII very seriously and per user details aren't being shared with 3rd parties (at present). Could they be misusing this? Or start selling it? Yes, but it would be an incredibly dumb idea from a brand value perspective, and I trust them to at least protect that. (I do honestly think that like most people, Microsoft employees are well-meaning individuals with good intentions)
What is this data used for? The most common use is to tell a large software developer "you have a memory leak in version 3.1.x when running on 4th gen intel CPUs with driver version 11.3" or similar. So companies with wide install bases (Oracle, IBM, other Microsoft divisions, etc) can fix issues which impact literally millions of users.
If anyone reading this has ever received this sort of Microsoft communication about your software, could you share your experiences?
> Having personally talked with Microsoft engineers who handle what this data is used for, I can tell you they take PII very seriously and per user details aren't being shared with 3rd parties (at present). Could they be misusing this? Or start selling it? Yes, but it would be an incredibly dumb idea from a brand value perspective, and I trust them to at least protect that. (I do honestly think that like most people, Microsoft employees are well-meaning individuals with good intentions)
Being an American company, you also have to worry about Microsoft being compelled to disclose per-user details with law enforcement or the intelligence community. They have no choice when it comes to this, so allowing them to have this data at all is dangerous.
> So ID numbers of all USB storage drives you've connected? Better not put sensitive data on a USB and send it to a journalist...
This should definitely work for hard disks, which have a serial number in their SMART data but do standard USB flash drives have any kind of unique identifier? There's the vendor ID but that covers every single instance of that model of device. Or is there some kind of identifier at the filesystem level?
To be more precise, you can't disable telemetry entirely on Windows Home or Professional in a supported manner.
You have root, so you can run third-party programs to do it. I myself use O&O's Shutup10. But this is unsupported and Microsoft overwrites those settings with every major updates such as the 1703 update coming this month. So you need to run it again.
Using Regedit to change things in the registry is fully supported by Microsoft. They even tell you to do it in many, many support articles.
Also, I have Admin rights on my computer because I own the computer. If somebody else owns the computer than they are welcome to set the settings however they like to. So I don't really see the problem.
You have a point, but you oversell it with the hyperbolic commentary and it makes me want to disagree with you. I don't like agreeing with people who exhibit such sloppy thinking.
> Note: even though it originally came from an acronym, Tor is not spelled "TOR". Only the first letter is capitalized. In fact, we can usually spot people who haven't read any of our website (and have instead learned everything they know about Tor from news articles) by the fact that they spell it wrong.
I could consider a scenario where heap dumps of a process crashing due to an exploit would be immensely helpful to Microsoft, since everyone is essentially now a honeypot-esque collector.
Wow, this means they will store in their databases your private data you had in RAM when something or Windows crashed? Am I wrong? because this sounds horrible, you should have an option on sending your memory dumps.
>While KeePass is running, sensitive data (like the hash of the master key and entry passwords) is stored encryptedly in process memory. This means that even if you would dump the KeePass process memory to disk, you could not find any sensitive data.
Either way, it is bad that Microsoft does not really warn people about this.
Why couldn't microsoft offer a Windows 10 "developer edition" allowing telemetry to be set to "security"? Make it cost $200 more, so typical users won't buy it, but why not make it available at all?
Not anymore. You can disable most of it but not all of it, and only via Group Policy, which any Windows admin here will know only works maybe 70% of the time at best.
That's what MS lip-service said two years ago. The inclusion, difficulty to arrest said services and reactivations in express violation of the users' intent through "security updates" tells a different story. What you may have meant to refer to was Enterprise LTSB; good luck getting a copy outside of a corporate licensing environment.
if by firewall you mean an EXTERNAL firewall (pfSense box or something), sure, but how do you trust the windows firewall? And anyways what if you do want software updates and the telemetry is sent as part of your update request? Unless you have deep packet inspection and drop the telemetry packets how are you going to make sure the data does not go out?
This is pretty much exactly the sort of thing "Pro" is meant for. Of course, for some mystifying reason Windows Pro, sold on business PCs, insists on preinstalling Candy Crush Soda Saga.
I don't understand what the Pro license even is at this point, since they refuse to treat it like one.
that's because the "pro" suffix is completely devalued nowadays, just look at the app store, "pro" usually just means "without ads" and/or "not stripped down in functionality"
We need a less trendy suffix to signify what "pro" used to, something like "modular" or "developer edition" or something, and have that also applicable to laptop/computers with no soldered RAM or SSDs etc. etc.
Make it cost more, fine, but make it available. Because in the long run every developer saying "the touch bar and low travel keyboard are not for me" or "I am not touching something with telemetry with a 10 foot pole" means less software for your platform later on.
As for my take, I have a little shell script that translates hosts files into unbound configuration files, with always_nxdomain rules for each superdomain. I then use that unbound instance as my DNS.
There is still no "stop sending my personal information to Microsoft" switch, but Microsoft has published a list of examples of what data the "telemetry" subsystems collect.
There are other Windows 10 subsystems (cortana, start menu, etc) that silently collect data, and they are not covered by the list the article links to.
I think that is necessary but not sufficient at this point, sadly.
I don't use outlook, but they announced some feature where it looks up the senders of your emails on linked in. So, if anyone you know uses outlook, then linkedin knows you know them.
I'm not sure if it looks at email bodies (yet), or if they rolled it out yet.
Either way, Microsoft should soon be able to sell employers a reasonably complete list of employees that are looking for a new job (including employees that are not active on linkedin or that do not even have linkedin accounts).
Cortana collects data that is considered "functional" by the TechNet document, which also links to the Cortana Privacy FAQ [1]. What you consider "Start Menu" I would presume likely refers to a cross-over of Windows Store and app reliability telemetry, which is all listed.
It might not be listed in name/order of the "subsystems" you expect to see, but that does not mean those "subsystems" aren't covered in the list.
Even if they would provide a full list of evertyhing they are collecting about you, how could you even prove that is really _everything_ as long as window is not OSS?
I suppose you'd have to take them on their word, but do they have that much trust from their users?
Well it's possible to inspect the system and determine if they were exceeding that, and then the backlash would be pretty heavy, perhaps even legal? Sure they could secretly leak stuff, but then we have to think a ton of engineers are in on truly spying on users, not just getting telemetry.
Doesn't stop them from sending down targeted updates to turn on deep telemetry, say, under a legal order.
This is similar to the WhatsApp situation. They claim all this crypto. If they were lying, someone could figure it out and FB would get slammed.
Sure, someone could. But it's easy enough to obfuscate it so that it would be extremely difficult to tell for sure. There's a reason why making things verifiably FOSS is such a big deal. "Someone would surely catch them and embarrass them" isn't a great reason to trust them.
Of course. But is it worth a billion dollars or whatever the, say, EU, might decide to fine them if caught? Plus the added compliance costs of whatever a court decides they need to do? Not to mention press and loss of government contracts, etc.
There should be a project to fund some research into this, verifying some popular closed source clients.
I suspect Microsoft's upside in capturing more details (websites visited?) for use in what, advertising?, less than VW's upside in circumventing physics.
Ads make money but it seems hard to capitalise off of secret collection - too many People involved and you can't advertise your capabilities to clients.
> Ads make money but it seems hard to capitalise off of secret collection - too many People involved and you can't advertise your capabilities to clients.
Why would it be? You don't have to tell advertisers how you got the data, just that you can show their ads to a certain demographic. And "websites visited" is just one of the things they can collect. Being able to advertise based on your documents, work-flow, social interactions, etc is probably much more powerful.
Windows 10 makes me want to move to Linux more than ever. I'm not some FOSS crusader, but I would like an operating system that doesn't spy on me, doesn't put ads in my desktop UI, and doesn't force people into an upgrade to do so.
It sounds to me like you want to take control of your computer, which basically makes you a FOSS crusader. Only Free Software puts you in control that way.
It's been years since I've futzed around with Linux... it's a little daunting. I need to be able to exchange Word documents with clients, and I worry about formatting errors and the like showing up if I'm creating those documents in LibreOffice. Also, I do like to play the occasional video game.
Really, what I want is Windows 7 that isn't locked to last-generation hardware and that isn't coming up on EOL. It wasn't FOSS, but it worked very well for what I needed.
The company I work for, CodeWeavers, sells a commercial version of Wine called CrossOver for exactly that use case. We're a little behind the current versions of Office; 2013 doesn't work very well yet, but old versions work excellently and we're working hard on 2013.
Good question, I don't know. I remember hearing something just this morning about CS5 working well, but I don't know if that was with some internal hacks or with our public product. We offer a free trial if you'd like to try it out.
I mean, I certainly can't recommend to everyone in the world in good faith to 100% ditch Windows, games/business software, whatever. The world is what it is, and other than the dark patterns and privacy issues Windows is actually pretty solid these days.
I'm slowly coming to grips with the fact that privacy is dead and there's nothing I can do about it, but dark patterns in my desktop OS is a pretty big issue for me, and using software that has my best interests in mind is a very refreshing experience. (plus I'm writing code all day that will run on Linux anyway..)
Used to be the goto distro for those who just wanted a "plug-n-go" experience was Ubuntu. Unfortunately, Ubuntu has lost their minds when it comes to the desktop interface. But - you may like it. Try it out (live thumbdrive or such). It's possible to go back to the "old" interface if you want, and it doesn't take much effort - but may be more than you really want to play with.
The other distro I have heard great reviews on that still has a sane interface is Linux Mint - again, try it before you "buy" it.
Virtually every distro except for a few niche ones have Live boot versions, that will allow you to try them out on your system, get a feel for what works, what doesn't (hardware and software-wise), and how the overall system "feels" - before committing to an install.
Your other option (to handle your use cases) might be to keep a windows partition (or on a separate drive) around and use that. Another option would be to use Microsoft's online Office360 suite (I think that's what it is called?). Or run VirtualBox on the Linux system, and run a version of Windows inside that. Any or all of these could be done together, in addition to using Crossover and/or Wine. You have a ton of choices here.
Also - for your documents - you say you are worried about formatting when they go to the client - does the client need to be able to edit them? If not, then dumping them out as a PDF might be able to work for you, if they'll accept PDF copies vs Word docs. The other thing to do would be to take a few of your old copies of docs you have sent to clients, and run them thru LibreOffice or something - see what they look like when you import them, then export them back out to a new file in the various Office formats, and load them back up in Word and see what it looks like. You might be surprised at what you find (you might be disappointed as well). This is all something you can try with the Live boot versions of Linux distros.
Oh - and games - besides using Crossover/Wine - there are a ton of native games available, plus plenty of "old-school" conversions and ports (some quite fun and amazing - some of the Doom/Doom 2 ports are pretty amazing). Also, there are a ton of Steam games on Linux available, too. If all you do is casual gaming, and don't care about always running the latest AAA shooter/fps/mmorpg or such - you'll usually be able to find something worthwhile and fun to play.
(I recommend MATE for the desktop interface, it's basically the software that Ubuntu [a Debian "derivative", hem hem] used when people thought it was great.)
It doesn't matter what Microsoft says or how they paint it. It doesn't matter how "transparent" they are. As long as data-gathering (read: snooping) is a part of the operating system, there will be a conflict between that and a user's desire for privacy. The only acceptable option for privacy-conscious users is to not use Windows 10 at all, unless and until Microsoft introduces an "Off" setting.
If it's the OS doing the data gathering, it can just hide that stuff from whatever you would use to monitor it. Look at how rootkits hide for an example.
Or won't again in the future. I finally bailed on MS completely (at home only unfortunately) when 10 came out and telemetry was first reported. I let myself get too comfortable with Windows 7, and will not make that mistake again.
Now, for example, it feels great to happen to notice my harddrive spin up when I'm sitting idle at my desk, and relax knowing my OS is just doing what it's supposed to, not covertely spying on me or installing some crud I didn't ask for.
I disagree. I, and millions of others, participate in the regular Steam survey which sips up quite a lot of my information. I do this because I don't mind and want to help steam and video game devs understand the PC gaming world. All MS has to do is replicate this system. Ask me to do this. Tell me what you collect. Done. That's it.
Nadella has a lot to learn from Newell and his crew. The "fuck consumers" attitude MS had during the Gates years, unfortunately, continues with Nadella's management. He never become the reformer we thought he would and the depressing part is that it would be very easy to implement these consumer friendly features and as I wrote, have already proven to be a success.
Respect your customers and we'll respect you. Treat us like children and we'll push back or just switch to OSX/Linux/Mobile.
I don't know. It can go both ways. You seem to assume that Microsoft cleaned up their act for the better, but for all we know it could be the opposite. You don't automatically become good (or less evil) by ageing.
Of course it's not automatic but pointing to something that happened in the distant past (on the scale of the technology industry) is a terrible argument to justify an opinion about something current.
I wasn't justifying my opinion. I was merely pointing out that it's odd to assume that Microsoft has changed for the better in the intervening 20 years, despite a) being awful 20 years ago, and b) having failed to demonstrate any change for the better since.
20 years ago, Microsoft was convicted as an abusive monopolist. It's up to them to convince me that they've reformed, and they're doing a kind of poor job of it.
Are you arguing that I am to just assume that they've changed due to the passage of time?
How hard does a 28 year old person need to work to convince you they're not the same as they were when they were 8 years old? Microsoft has changed CEOs and lower leadership a number of times in the last 20 years. I submit that it would be difficult to find ANY company that can go 20 years without changing.
But they've done nothing to suggest they've shed their utterly user-hostile philosophy from 20 years ago. It just manifests in different ways.
To run with your analogy: imagine you ran into someone at 40, someone you hadn't seen in 20 years. 20 years ago he was into petty theft and vandalism. These days, he works as a lawyer for a patent troll. The specifics have changed; his character has not.
People can become very dangerous when their life is threatened. I think their new strategy is to hurt OSS from within. For example make OSS harder to use, or move it in a direction away from their core income/market.
20 years ago, Microsoft had an astoundingly user-hostile philosophy that manifested, at the time, in the Halloween documents: a strategy for 'defeating' Linux & open source software, rather than winning by producing a better outcome for their customers.
The user-hostile philosophy continues. But now, they've conceded the battle to open source software in general, and Linux in particular (witness moves towards Docker support on Windows). Thus the user-hostility now manifests as rampant advertising, and bullying users into unwanted upgrades.
My point is that Microsoft had nothing but contempt for their users 20 years ago, and they've done nothing since to change that.
Telemetry at the OS level bothers me to the point that I'm not Windows user anymore and I I'm not planning to become one anytime soon.
But to be fair one should point out that Apple is also collecting telemetry data (search system logs for com.apple.telemetry) without any toggles in the system preferences.
Search results don't bring much info on what is collected and how it is being used. Does anyone here have insight into Apple telemetry granularity?
My take on this is that Microsoft is stuck in an awful compromise. Google's stuff is free because their business model is surveillance. Apple compromised the user experience to preserve privacy until it could push the machine learning algorithms to user devices. Siri lagged (lags?) Google, but it can now find all my locally stored cat pictures, even though Apple doesn't have a copy of them. There are toggles in iOS to prevent Apple from gathering personal info.
Microsoft is trying to double dip: Windows wants to be a premium product like Apple, and the cloud division wants to be Google. The CEO is from the cloud division.
To get more user data, many teams in Microsoft backported data collection to existing Windows devices without an opt-in (or even opt-out) at the same time they made telemetry mandatory, effectively compromising millions of devices.
This completely destroyed any trust privacy-minded users had in them. Now the telmetry team (which is probably actually acting in good faith, and just trying to make stuff better) is the lightning rod for all the other inappropriate data collection being done in Redmond.
This is why there is such a disconnect between Apple's response to privacy issues (usually: "oops, crap. We'll fix it in the next release") and Microsoft's responses, like this article, where the spokesperson doesn't have the knowledge or authority to provide honest answers.
Microsoft allows more control over data collection in Enterprise than in Home or Pro. That seems like a calculation about how much each group could push back, not acting in good faith.
When you setup macOS and after updates it asks if you'd like to send diagnostic data to apple and crash logs to devs. That's probably what you're seeing.
I've switched my desktop computer to linux (Mint) with Wine. It's great. Very easy, stable and feature rich. Easier to deal with and customize. There are still some issues with software compatibility or security but it's on par with Windows enough that I haven't really noticed. The only problem I have is games. I hibernate and boot back into Windows 7 for GTA5!
I ranted in another article regarding Microsoft's Explorer Advertising about my frustration with MS conflicting with my desire to support the good work some of their teams are doing, such as C#, Visual Studio Code, and Typescript. After reading through the comments here about everything this covers and which cannot be disabled, I'm putting my money where my mouth is and I'm stopping all further use of C#, F#, Visual Studio, Typescript, Azure, etc. I know that my individual loss means nothing to MS, but it's clear that MS is dying to attract developers to their platforms; as such, we who are outraged at MS's privacy violations need to act together to reject MS technologies, as that is one of the few things that they will listen to.
Disclaimer: These concerns of course extend to other companies actions, but in the context of this article MS is the most relevant company.
Although I've managed to neuter this crap, we really need a table which details all the data MS, Google, Apple, various Linux apps collect under the guise of 'usage data'. I'm willing to grant that most of this is not nefarious, but there should definitely be an opt-out. As the owner of the machine, I do not want my CPU cycles going towards this, or JS scripts that track me, etc.
On OSX this document seems to say no data is sent without explicit instruction, but then it says "data can be sent automatically if one of these events occurs".
One can run Windows virtual machine on a Linux host at near native GPU performance with PCI passthrough and KVM for gaming and then besides Windows registry use Iptables to block Microsoft Atlas telemetry. I use that setup for playing Windows PC games which are not yet available native on Linux.
Yes you should use a genuine copy of Microsoft Windows for security purposes so that you do not get malware. I use a paid license of Windows home edition.
I think that things like this are cool from a technical perspective. From a business and financial perspective you are still giving money to people who refuse to release linux versions of games. In the long run this supports microsoft, their telemetry and other their BS.
I am playing strategy FPS Fallout4 2560x1440 it runs at 60fps ultra setting, car, train simulators. Hardware i7 6700k, Nvidia Geforce 1070p, Samsung 950 Pro M2.
Passmark score 4937, 93th Percentile
3D graphics score 12610, 99th Percentile
2D graphics 710, 72th Percentile
Memory 2420 82th Percentile,
Disk Mark 10435, 99th Percentile
This change in the settings menu fixes absolutely NOTHING. Suppose that as the article describes, you go ahead and chose the Basic setting for telemetry. What happens next week when some update is published and reverts back your settings to Full telemetry? This is not a theoretical scenario, many past updates have changed the state of the user chosen settings (including telemetry) without the users knowledge. In Computer Science parlance, the settings menu is non-deterministic, meaning you cannot be sure what state it is in now, as compared to the next minute.
So for example if you are a lawyer, a doctor, or a stock broker, and are typing a sensitive document for a client, even if you are diligent and checked that telemetry was set to Basic, before and after you typed the document, there still exists the possibility that for a few minutes the setting was changed to Full telemetry due to a background windows update, and minutes later reset again to Basic telemetry due to another update, thus leaking the sensitive document without you even knowing about it. That is what being non-deterministic means and is obviously unacceptable for certain professional software usage scenarios.
But the greatest flaw in Windows 10 is not the keylogger. The greatest flaw is the Delivery Optimization module, its new peer-to-peer software delivery system. Basically, with Windows 10, the DLLs that compose your kernel do not come from Microsoft servers directly, but come from Joe down the street, or worse from Boris the hacker from some other country, due to peering. What could possibly go wrong with that? In effect, your attack surface is the entire internet, and all that it would take for someone to compromise your system is some buffer overflow to nullify the hash thar Delivery Optimization uses to validate the peered DLLs.
Windows 10 has many great features, and one can see truly the significant positive progress Microsoft is making every month. But Microsoft really needs to purge the telemetry DLL and the delivery optimization DLL from the base windows install. They introduce unacceptable risks in several professional usage scenarios.
Sometimes? More like all the time. Microsoft still gets unfair criticism when what it is doing is usually less than its competitors (Apple, Google.)
It's pretty astounding, HN reads like early 2000s Slashdot sometimes in regards to its complete hatred of Windows. This entire thread is almost verbatim early 2000s Slashdot, "I just switched to Linux and I love it" along with all the OSS evangelists piling on. It's more annoying than insightful.
Actually I think the defense of "Microsoft should never adapt to market standards that others have set, because they are Microsoft" is never a good defense.
Honestly there is a lot of hypocrisy here in this thread. How many of us work for startups that either collect data on users usage of their app or rely heavily on the data Google/FB/Twitter etc have mined?
Ahh, the old "nobody's holding a gun to your head, you didn't have to spend $50 for dinner, you could have had Kraft Mac & Cheese!" argument. Good one.
> "Marisa Rogers, the "privacy officer" of the Windows and Devices Group, told us that the telemetry data is genuinely useful to making Windows better. As an example the company offered us, there was a problem with the Windows Alarm app. "
So massive levels of enforced data collection are justified by them fixing the Windows Alarm App.
There is nothing that they could do to placate this crowd. even if they stopped collecting telemetry then there would be a vocal contingent of people complaining that it isnt open source. if it was open source and people didnt like the way it handled init a loud contingent would complain.
207 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 557 ms ] threadHell, everybody's getting rich doing it!
http://adage.com/article/datadriven-marketing/24-billion-dat...
They may not have even considered that "telemetry" might hurt their image (or profits). Even on HN we regularly see people complaining that they cannot switch to a different OS. Technical solutions sometimes help but MS probably assumes that most people will submit to the lockin. Image doesn't matter when most people are tied to the platform. When games are enough to tie people to Windows, MS can do whatever they want.
They are not publishing exactly what they are collecting for the "Full" telemetry setting, which is opt-in. I'm guessing they don't want to commit to that because they want to be free to add and remove metrics they're interested in.
It's just evasive on Microsoft's part.
To their minimal credit, I suppose, you can no longer avoid the toggle when installing or upgrading to the Creators Update, which you could do in previous Windows with telemetry. I doubt that many will still bother even reading the labels of the toggles though, let alone consider whether they'd be better served with an option other than the default.
This is not a list of "telemetry data collected by Windows 10".
I am beginning to suspect that they do not have adequate internal safeguards to control the collection of personally identifiable information across the entire company (including office, bing, skype, linkedin, etc, etc).
That would mean they are actually incapable of enumerating all the information a clean Windows 10 install and office 365 will phone home. It would also explain discrepancies between todays's list and third party audits of Windows 10.
The impression I get is that this information took so long to produce because they did have to sit down with all of the various teams involved.
They also don't seem to be attempting any Orwellian use of the word "telemetry", though it is technically explicit. They start the document by establishing the definition, if you care to question it more directly: https://technet.microsoft.com/itpro/windows/configure/config...
This whole thread is somewhat disheartening, actually. Devs - especially ones developing against a broad hardware ecosystem - need feedback from the field to surface problems. That need must be balanced against privacy.
A golden hope would be an open standard for collection and anonymized storage of telemetry data. It's likely difficult to say exactly what is needed from one os to the next though, once you get into the technical details of what needs to be monitored for useful debugging of major subsystems... So seems far fetched.
"These improvements are unlikely to appease that minority of users that regard the mandatory telemetry as an unacceptable intrusion..."
by "minority", I assume the author means those pesky, conscientous types who prefer not to have every action disseminated for exploitation. Analytics make the world a better place, and they can be abused as spyware... it all comes down to trust. MS's history speaks for itself.
If only THAT were true.
Included:
"Storage attributes, such as number of drives, type, and size" -- So ID numbers of all USB storage drives you've connected? Better not put sensitive data on a USB and send it to a journalist...
"the number of crashes or hangs, and application state change details, such as how much processor time and memory were used, and the total uptime for an app." -- To e.g. determine when you used the TOR browser, since the difference in uptime between two time points is how much it was up during that interval.
"App usage data. Includes how an app is used, including how long an app is used, when the app has focus, and when the app is started" -- Oh, never mind, they also explicitly state they gather which apps you have installed and how much and when you use them in the next section.
"Accessory device data. Includes a list of accessory devices, such as printers or external storage devices, that are connected to Windows PCs and whether these devices will function after upgrading to a new version of the operating system." -- Print poster and glue it to a wall -> Printer gets identified via tracking dots ( https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-d... ) -> Printer is linked back to you, even if you bought it with cash. I hope you didn't print anything your local sheriff would dislike!
Edit: This is all in the 'basic' level, which you can't disable.
Guess what mine is saying...
So, if you don't enable at least enhanced telemetry, Microsoft does not want to hear from you, does not care about your feedback, and no Microsoft employee will respond to your query on the matter.
I've tried to engage the Windows Insider folks over a couple different mediums, as far as I can tell they're barred from talking to anyone who even mentions telemetry.
Hey, LANGUAGE!
How in the hell can this just be called analytics?
This level of data isn't anonymous. It can't be.
If another piece of software did this, Microsoft would label it spyware and Windows Defender would kill it.
Yet, they feel fine doing this with an OS that they actually sell. It's not even crap freeware. You pay to have your every move watched.
is there some big list of the hardware I have bought? If not, sure, they can fingerprint me but I don't see how it de-anonymizes me.
Combine that with unique combinations... and you get an increasing confidence of who the end user is.
It's why they suggest you don't "full screen" browsers when using tor... Stuff like browser sizes can identify you:
https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/102133/how-can-...
It's easy to tell that if a custom screen size can identify you... what will other unique traits do?
[1] http://latanyasweeney.org/work/identifiability.html
aka, what dandelion_lover said.
Note that they don't tell you which of the other levels enables Windows Update telemetry, which is apparently helpful.
That's just a single datapoint, but Shutup10 and other similar programs are very popular. If it broke updates people would be making noise about it.
If you have a clean android phone I suspect there no monitoring going on. For example if you use a community built mod or build AOSP yourself.
Not that's ideal, but it seems a lot better than Windows 10 seemingly indefatigible ways and means of sneaking data out. Ignoring hosts file and DNS responses is just rude.
[0] baseband attacks are still a problem, but at that level of threat then the BIOS or management subsystem on your PC isn't trustworthy either.
[0] https://tehnoetic.com/tehnoetic-s3-phone-replicant
Not that I think Android is on a good trajectory in terms of user control, but hopefully alternatives such as Sailfish gain traction.
Linux and WINE have made great strides over the last few years but it's still nowhere close to becoming a full replacement.
On the other hand, most mobile devices have locked bootloaders, actively work to prevent giving the owner root access, and speak directly out to the Internet using proprietary networking modules.
I know Windows is a large piece of SW, but this seems "quite" big for the "Basic" level... :/
> To e.g. determine when you used the TOR browser, since the difference in uptime between two time points is how much it was up during that interval.
Having personally talked with Microsoft engineers who handle what this data is used for, I can tell you they take PII very seriously and per user details aren't being shared with 3rd parties (at present). Could they be misusing this? Or start selling it? Yes, but it would be an incredibly dumb idea from a brand value perspective, and I trust them to at least protect that. (I do honestly think that like most people, Microsoft employees are well-meaning individuals with good intentions)
What is this data used for? The most common use is to tell a large software developer "you have a memory leak in version 3.1.x when running on 4th gen intel CPUs with driver version 11.3" or similar. So companies with wide install bases (Oracle, IBM, other Microsoft divisions, etc) can fix issues which impact literally millions of users.
If anyone reading this has ever received this sort of Microsoft communication about your software, could you share your experiences?
Being an American company, you also have to worry about Microsoft being compelled to disclose per-user details with law enforcement or the intelligence community. They have no choice when it comes to this, so allowing them to have this data at all is dangerous.
Imagine how damaging it would be to their brand value if they put ads in the main OS interface.
Then let me disable this telemetry completely, I'm fed-up with people that know better than me what's good for me.
While (like many here) I'm very privacy oriented, this is a situation where Occam's Razor applies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor
I'm sure they do, but that still doesn't make me trust them or feel any better about this.
This should definitely work for hard disks, which have a serial number in their SMART data but do standard USB flash drives have any kind of unique identifier? There's the vendor ID but that covers every single instance of that model of device. Or is there some kind of identifier at the filesystem level?
Fairly certain USB drives don't have serial numbers, just vendor numbers that are far from unique.
[1] http://www.usb.org/developers/docs/devclass_docs/usbmassbulk...
Incorrect. Please stop spreading this misinformation.
http://winaero.com/blog/how-to-disable-telemetry-and-data-co...
You have root, so you can run third-party programs to do it. I myself use O&O's Shutup10. But this is unsupported and Microsoft overwrites those settings with every major updates such as the 1703 update coming this month. So you need to run it again.
Also, I have Admin rights on my computer because I own the computer. If somebody else owns the computer than they are welcome to set the settings however they like to. So I don't really see the problem.
> Note: even though it originally came from an acronym, Tor is not spelled "TOR". Only the first letter is capitalized. In fact, we can usually spot people who haven't read any of our website (and have instead learned everything they know about Tor from news articles) by the fact that they spell it wrong.
Maybe I should not have used Windows Insider after all which forces you to have it on full...
There needs to be an off switch for this, though.
I wonder how this affects something like Keepass. If I had it unlocked open while Windows crashed, does Microsoft now have all my passwords?
If you attempt to use legal recourse you will likely fail and your passwords could become publicly viewable evidence.
Change your passwords and don't store them on a close sourced system, this is the only mitigation I see you having that is sure to work.
>While KeePass is running, sensitive data (like the hash of the master key and entry passwords) is stored encryptedly in process memory. This means that even if you would dump the KeePass process memory to disk, you could not find any sensitive data.
Either way, it is bad that Microsoft does not really warn people about this.
[1] http://keepass.info/help/base/security.html#secmemprot
Enterprise still doesn't let you disable telemetry though - just lets you set it to basic.
If you want to disable it fully you need the LTSB version.
you can set it to security through gpedit
https://github.com/crazy-max/WindowsSpyBlocker
And no this won't fix the core problem so the best solution is to avoid windows completely.
I boot mine up sometimes when I want to play a game not on linux or playstation, however that is becoming increasingly rare.
I don't understand what the Pro license even is at this point, since they refuse to treat it like one.
We need a less trendy suffix to signify what "pro" used to, something like "modular" or "developer edition" or something, and have that also applicable to laptop/computers with no soldered RAM or SSDs etc. etc.
Make it cost more, fine, but make it available. Because in the long run every developer saying "the touch bar and low travel keyboard are not for me" or "I am not touching something with telemetry with a 10 foot pole" means less software for your platform later on.
Why engage in their game and try to whack-a-mole their software, if you have a choice.
I admit, for some, there is no alternative. And that's why there's the outrage.
I think I'll just dump its traffic with no network apps open and see which addresses it calls home on.
https://github.com/crazy-max/WindowsSpyBlocker
https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
There is still no "stop sending my personal information to Microsoft" switch, but Microsoft has published a list of examples of what data the "telemetry" subsystems collect.
There are other Windows 10 subsystems (cortana, start menu, etc) that silently collect data, and they are not covered by the list the article links to.
Sure there is. Don't use Windows.
I think that is necessary but not sufficient at this point, sadly.
I don't use outlook, but they announced some feature where it looks up the senders of your emails on linked in. So, if anyone you know uses outlook, then linkedin knows you know them.
I'm not sure if it looks at email bodies (yet), or if they rolled it out yet.
Either way, Microsoft should soon be able to sell employers a reasonably complete list of employees that are looking for a new job (including employees that are not active on linkedin or that do not even have linkedin accounts).
This is one example of many, I'm sure.
It might not be listed in name/order of the "subsystems" you expect to see, but that does not mean those "subsystems" aren't covered in the list.
[1] https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-10-cortana-and-p...
I wonder if it is possible to write an app that does this?
I suppose you'd have to take them on their word, but do they have that much trust from their users?
Doesn't stop them from sending down targeted updates to turn on deep telemetry, say, under a legal order.
This is similar to the WhatsApp situation. They claim all this crypto. If they were lying, someone could figure it out and FB would get slammed.
There should be a project to fund some research into this, verifying some popular closed source clients.
Ads make money but it seems hard to capitalise off of secret collection - too many People involved and you can't advertise your capabilities to clients.
Why would it be? You don't have to tell advertisers how you got the data, just that you can show their ads to a certain demographic. And "websites visited" is just one of the things they can collect. Being able to advertise based on your documents, work-flow, social interactions, etc is probably much more powerful.
(and I'll take this opportunity to thank everyone who works on FOSS software, paid or otherwise)
Really, what I want is Windows 7 that isn't locked to last-generation hardware and that isn't coming up on EOL. It wasn't FOSS, but it worked very well for what I needed.
I'm slowly coming to grips with the fact that privacy is dead and there's nothing I can do about it, but dark patterns in my desktop OS is a pretty big issue for me, and using software that has my best interests in mind is a very refreshing experience. (plus I'm writing code all day that will run on Linux anyway..)
The other distro I have heard great reviews on that still has a sane interface is Linux Mint - again, try it before you "buy" it.
Virtually every distro except for a few niche ones have Live boot versions, that will allow you to try them out on your system, get a feel for what works, what doesn't (hardware and software-wise), and how the overall system "feels" - before committing to an install.
Your other option (to handle your use cases) might be to keep a windows partition (or on a separate drive) around and use that. Another option would be to use Microsoft's online Office360 suite (I think that's what it is called?). Or run VirtualBox on the Linux system, and run a version of Windows inside that. Any or all of these could be done together, in addition to using Crossover and/or Wine. You have a ton of choices here.
Also - for your documents - you say you are worried about formatting when they go to the client - does the client need to be able to edit them? If not, then dumping them out as a PDF might be able to work for you, if they'll accept PDF copies vs Word docs. The other thing to do would be to take a few of your old copies of docs you have sent to clients, and run them thru LibreOffice or something - see what they look like when you import them, then export them back out to a new file in the various Office formats, and load them back up in Word and see what it looks like. You might be surprised at what you find (you might be disappointed as well). This is all something you can try with the Live boot versions of Linux distros.
Oh - and games - besides using Crossover/Wine - there are a ton of native games available, plus plenty of "old-school" conversions and ports (some quite fun and amazing - some of the Doom/Doom 2 ports are pretty amazing). Also, there are a ton of Steam games on Linux available, too. If all you do is casual gaming, and don't care about always running the latest AAA shooter/fps/mmorpg or such - you'll usually be able to find something worthwhile and fun to play.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Linux_Di...
Learn it, and your time will not be wasted.
(I recommend MATE for the desktop interface, it's basically the software that Ubuntu [a Debian "derivative", hem hem] used when people thought it was great.)
Give it time, friend. In another ten years you may find yourself exactly that. FOSS is the only way out of this hole we've dug for ourselves.
[1] https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/tcpview.asp... [2] https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/processexpl...
A monitoring device connected along the network path would be more trustworthy.
Now, for example, it feels great to happen to notice my harddrive spin up when I'm sitting idle at my desk, and relax knowing my OS is just doing what it's supposed to, not covertely spying on me or installing some crud I didn't ask for.
Nadella has a lot to learn from Newell and his crew. The "fuck consumers" attitude MS had during the Gates years, unfortunately, continues with Nadella's management. He never become the reformer we thought he would and the depressing part is that it would be very easy to implement these consumer friendly features and as I wrote, have already proven to be a success.
Respect your customers and we'll respect you. Treat us like children and we'll push back or just switch to OSX/Linux/Mobile.
http://www.catb.org/esr/halloween/
Why anyone would choose to trust them is beyond me.
Are you arguing that I am to just assume that they've changed due to the passage of time?
But they've done nothing to suggest they've shed their utterly user-hostile philosophy from 20 years ago. It just manifests in different ways.
To run with your analogy: imagine you ran into someone at 40, someone you hadn't seen in 20 years. 20 years ago he was into petty theft and vandalism. These days, he works as a lawyer for a patent troll. The specifics have changed; his character has not.
20 years ago, Microsoft had an astoundingly user-hostile philosophy that manifested, at the time, in the Halloween documents: a strategy for 'defeating' Linux & open source software, rather than winning by producing a better outcome for their customers.
The user-hostile philosophy continues. But now, they've conceded the battle to open source software in general, and Linux in particular (witness moves towards Docker support on Windows). Thus the user-hostility now manifests as rampant advertising, and bullying users into unwanted upgrades.
My point is that Microsoft had nothing but contempt for their users 20 years ago, and they've done nothing since to change that.
But to be fair one should point out that Apple is also collecting telemetry data (search system logs for com.apple.telemetry) without any toggles in the system preferences.
Search results don't bring much info on what is collected and how it is being used. Does anyone here have insight into Apple telemetry granularity?
- will do it well enough so that you can't find out
- control PR well enough so that it won't leak out
- have enough fan boys that if by any miracle people learn about it they'd be cool with it anyway
Microsoft is trying to double dip: Windows wants to be a premium product like Apple, and the cloud division wants to be Google. The CEO is from the cloud division.
To get more user data, many teams in Microsoft backported data collection to existing Windows devices without an opt-in (or even opt-out) at the same time they made telemetry mandatory, effectively compromising millions of devices.
This completely destroyed any trust privacy-minded users had in them. Now the telmetry team (which is probably actually acting in good faith, and just trying to make stuff better) is the lightning rod for all the other inappropriate data collection being done in Redmond.
This is why there is such a disconnect between Apple's response to privacy issues (usually: "oops, crap. We'll fix it in the next release") and Microsoft's responses, like this article, where the spokesperson doesn't have the knowledge or authority to provide honest answers.
I did find this which is interesting and helpful:
https://github.com/drduh/macOS-Security-and-Privacy-Guide
That's really the problem. Microsoft doesn't allow you to opt-out.
Disclaimer: These concerns of course extend to other companies actions, but in the context of this article MS is the most relevant company.
(Maybe I'm being naive.)
I feel like what we really need might be a legislation mandating easy opt-out (or even better, requiring opt-in).
https://support.apple.com/kb/PH25654
On OSX this document seems to say no data is sent without explicit instruction, but then it says "data can be sent automatically if one of these events occurs".
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVM...
[1]: http://www.play-asia.com/microsoft-windows-10-pro-3264-bit-o...
Passmark score 4937, 93th Percentile 3D graphics score 12610, 99th Percentile 2D graphics 710, 72th Percentile Memory 2420 82th Percentile, Disk Mark 10435, 99th Percentile
Passmark link https://imgur.com/a/mu0ln
If you decide to try it do not miss the kvm ignroe msrs=1 setting, otherwise KVM will crash. /etc/modprobe.d/kvm.conf options kvm ignore_msrs=1
/etc/default/grub pass in setting intel_iommu=on and hugepages. GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet intel_iommu=on hugepages=4096"
So for example if you are a lawyer, a doctor, or a stock broker, and are typing a sensitive document for a client, even if you are diligent and checked that telemetry was set to Basic, before and after you typed the document, there still exists the possibility that for a few minutes the setting was changed to Full telemetry due to a background windows update, and minutes later reset again to Basic telemetry due to another update, thus leaking the sensitive document without you even knowing about it. That is what being non-deterministic means and is obviously unacceptable for certain professional software usage scenarios.
But the greatest flaw in Windows 10 is not the keylogger. The greatest flaw is the Delivery Optimization module, its new peer-to-peer software delivery system. Basically, with Windows 10, the DLLs that compose your kernel do not come from Microsoft servers directly, but come from Joe down the street, or worse from Boris the hacker from some other country, due to peering. What could possibly go wrong with that? In effect, your attack surface is the entire internet, and all that it would take for someone to compromise your system is some buffer overflow to nullify the hash thar Delivery Optimization uses to validate the peered DLLs.
Windows 10 has many great features, and one can see truly the significant positive progress Microsoft is making every month. But Microsoft really needs to purge the telemetry DLL and the delivery optimization DLL from the base windows install. They introduce unacceptable risks in several professional usage scenarios.
Microsoft tends to get singled out while being the better option, sometimes
It's pretty astounding, HN reads like early 2000s Slashdot sometimes in regards to its complete hatred of Windows. This entire thread is almost verbatim early 2000s Slashdot, "I just switched to Linux and I love it" along with all the OSS evangelists piling on. It's more annoying than insightful.
This is a subjective opinion (i.e., subject to debate), and also a harmful one. "The other guy is worse" is never a good defense.
FOSS is important.
Answer: Probably all of us.
Would it be a call for the next phase of technology economy to begin (whatever that would be) and ending the current 'data' economy rise?
Speak for yourself.
I play games, so I have no choice in the OS. Windows is the only choice. I can choose not to use Google or Facebook.
E.g., is my web browsing traffic collected by Microsoft?
So massive levels of enforced data collection are justified by them fixing the Windows Alarm App.
I just want the ability to opt-out.