Microsoft's Telemetry Additions To Windows 7 and 8 Raise Privacy Concerns

WheezyJoe writes: ghacks and Ars Technica are providing more detail about Windows 10's telemetry and "privacy invasion" features being backported to Windows 7 and 8. The articles list and explain some of the involved updates by number (e.g., KB3068708, KB3022345, KB3075249, and KB3080149). The Ars article says the Windows firewall can block the traffic just fine, and the service sending the telemetry can be disabled. "Additionally, most or all of the traffic appears to be contingent on participating in the CEIP in the first place. If the CEIP is disabled, it appears that little or no traffic gets sent. This may not always have been the case, however; the notes that accompany the 3080149 update say that the amount of network activity when not part of CEIP has been reduced." The ghacks article explains other ways block the unwanted traffic and uninstall the updates.

Comments

Trifecta of obscurity

[Okian Warrior]

"Raises privacy concerns" is elliptical speech: it's made to be deliberately obscure. (It uses "causes concern" to convey the central point without giving any information about what the point is.)

It's also passive voice, in that there's no person performing the action, the action is simply "caused" by something. (For comparison, consider "we wrote reports" versus "reports were written".) Hence, there's no person or group responsible, it's simply an aspect of situation.

And finally, the phrase uses framing to soften the effect. Your personal information isn't being harvested, the system simply "raises some concerns".

Taken as a whole the headline tries to get the reader emotionally involved by stating something we should be concerned about, without saying in concrete terms *that* there is anything to be concerned about, and that it's *other people* who are concerned.

Meh. This didn't work on me, I'm not actually concerned, I'm going to ignore it.

(Propaganda success!)

Re:Define Your Acronyms

[denis-The-menace]

And it's a failure b/c they ignore what people really wanted: the Start Menu.

Instead we got the Start List: 100+ icons to scroll through.

Only Santa's list is longer.

Windows 10

[Fire_Wraith]

I really want to like Windows 10. It seems to have a lot of nice features, was a smooth upgrade from 7, and probably the single most painless OS upgrade I've had on any MS platform (I had to correct a single driver, for a minor issue, and that was it).

But I'm really, really sick of just how blatantly Microsoft is trying to jam every single stupid thing into this, and tie it back to their cloud based bit. And I might even be okay with some of that, because I'm well aware that I wind up giving a lot to Google when I'm using stuff on Android. I might even use some of it, if they weren't going far beyond even what Google does.

The final straw was when they wanted to essentially remove my local account on the machine and replace it with me using a Microsoft account for my local login. No, sorry, but Redmond can go get fucked if they want that. It's one thing to have stuff in a cloud based application that has its own password, but it's another thing for that cloud based password to be my entire system. Perhaps I'm being overly negative, but it's just too much, that they want all this personal data, and they want to tie it all not just to what I do in application land with Outlook/Bing/Edge/Cortana/Skype whatever, but down to the OS level? No. And if it gets worse, I may just have to bite the bullet and do my PC gaming on Linux, and give up on doing anything bleeding edge.

Re:Windows 10

[Fire_Wraith]

I try to at least take it into consideration. I don't feel like I need complete privacy and anonymity, in part because I like some of the aspects of the connected and digital world.

That said, I try to at least be aware of some of the trade-offs, and who my information is going to (which sadly is a lot more effort than most people are interested in making). It comes down to who I'm willing to grant access to what information, to what degree - in part because of what they're likely to do with it, as well as what I feel like I get out of the service.

It's part of why I avoid using Facebook, because of their (nightmarish) track record and attitude towards things. On the other hand I use a number of services that are quite capable of tracking lots of things about me, and in some cases noticeably do - everyone from my cellphone provider, to Amazon when I browse or buy stuff, to Google when I search for something or use their map service, etc.

Why do I use those and not Facebook? Mostly because I'm of the opinion Facebook doesn't give a rat's ass who it sells stuff to, and wants to know every last thing about me and my personal life. If anything, they're more like an Intelligence Agency in their overwhelming and aggressive interest in my information. The others are at least more content with the stuff I give them. Amazon? Amazon can know what I buy and view from Amazon, in part because sometimes they'll later show me more stuff that I'm sometimes interested in. I'd be happier with the option to turn it off, maybe, but that's still a choice I can make between shopping there and not.

But there's a difference between having applications that I choose to use - such as Skype for instance - that links back into Microsoft's cloud, and having the very OS itself basically running in SaaS mode with a cloud based account. It's also not just about the privacy issues, but also the security issues that syncing my local password and my cloud password presents.

Re:Sigh, guess no Win boxes in the lab then

[chipschap]

they didn't listen because they wanted stuff to "just work".

The further irony is that they didn't even get that much ... what they got was "stuff just works, except when it doesn't."

Now ... before anyone says, "yeah but stuff doesn't 'just work' on Linux either" ---- I know that. But I also know how much I paid for Linux. And if I'm good enough at it, I'm free to "fix stuff" and "make stuff work" I've done so many times. (Sure there are limits, the kernel is not so easy to fix ... but still ... you at least have full source access.)

Re:Sigh

[exomondo]

Why, again, do people still use Windows?

Because it runs the programs they need to run and works with the devices they use. That is the primary purpose of an operating system, nobody turns on their computer just to use the operating system.

Trust on system updates broken

[naranek]

The thing that worries me it that there are now dozens of articles about which updates to remove to disable telemetry or the Windows 10 update nagbox. We've been saying that installing security updates is fundamental to keeping your computer secure. This goes against that. Do we really want to teach people to uninstall random updates based on shady blog articles?

Earlier I had all automatic update checkboxes checked, because I trusted that security updates are just that - security updates. From now on I'll be checking all the updates manually before installing, and I really hate to have to do that.

And before anybody recommends switch to Linux, I already use Linux as my main OS.