A Naysayer's Take On Windows 10: Potential Privacy Mess, and Worse

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 30, 2015 @07:23AM from the all-fingers-both-hands dept.

Lauren Weinstein writes: I had originally been considering accepting Microsoft's offer of a free upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10. After all, reports have suggested that it's a much more usable system than Windows 8/8.1 — but of course in keeping with the 'every other MS release of Windows is a dog' history, that's a pretty low bar. However, it appears that MS has significantly botched their deployment of Windows 10. I suppose we shouldn't be surprised, even though hope springs eternal. Since there are so many issues involved, and MS is very aggressively pushing this upgrade, I'm going to run through key points here quickly, and reference other sites' pages that can give you more information right now. But here's my executive summary: You may want to think twice, or three times, or many more times, about whether or not you wish to accept the Windows 10 free upgrade on your existing Windows 7 or 8/8.1 system. Now that we're into the first week of widespread availability for the new version, if you're a Windows user and upgrader, has your experience been good, horrible, or someplace between?

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Re:I'm surprised they missed "Wi-Fi Sense." by click2005 · 2015-07-30 07:42 · Score: 5, Interesting

It'll give loads of people a way to try to get out of copyright infringement lawsuits... "Windows 10" shared my Wifi password"

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Re:The Privacy Mess is because of? by Solandri · 2015-07-30 08:59 · Score: 5, Interesting

Anti-Microsoft, pro-Google, and no stated reason for faith in one "doing the right thing with respect to protecting the data" while the other, apparently, will not.
I own my own domain and I give each service I sign up for a unique contact email alias, which forwards to my real email address (currently I have just shy of 500 aliases). I have never received spam at google@mydomain.com. In fact the vast majority of my email aliases receive no spam, indicating the vast majority of online companies are in fact keeping your private info private (at least not without anonymizing it). Contrary to what seems to be the general belief here.

The two major exceptions have been microsoft@mydomain.com and adobe@mydomain.com. Those two companies clearly sold my email address to marketers and spammers.