Microsoft Monitoring How Long You Use Windows 10 (betanews.com)

Mark Wilson writes: The various privacy concerns surrounding Windows 10 have received a lot of coverage in the media, but it seems that there are ever more secrets coming to light. The Threshold 2 Update did nothing to curtail privacy invasion, and the latest Windows 10 installation figures show that Microsoft is also monitoring how long people are using the operating system. This might seem like a slightly strange statistic for Microsoft to keep track of, but the company knows how long, collectively, Windows 10 has been running on computers around the world. To have reached this figure (11 billion hours in December, apparently) Microsoft must have been logging individuals' usage times. Intrigued, we contacted Microsoft to find out what on earth is going on.

Comments

no one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

We already know it collects your private information. It even says so in the fucking EULA. When will we stop pretending to be shocked that Microsoft is gathering one more metric from the users of their closed-source operating system?

It will become news when it reads: "Microsoft no longer collecting user data from Windows 10".

Re: no one cares

[Z00L00K]

In some countries the EULA would be thrown out and burned if ever tried in court.

If it weren't for games

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be the year of another desktop.

Re:If it weren't for games

[Altrag]

a bit more of a hassle

You've just lost 50+% of your target audience.

For the vast majority of users, games come in three forms:
- Click to buy (steam, console downloads.)
- Insert a disc (consoles again.)
- Log onto a website (flash games and their ilk.)

(This applies to non-games as well for the most part, though productivity and business software gets a bit more leeway as they're frequently "must haves" rather than "waste a couple hours.")

People don't want to work to be entertained. They just want to play the damned game, watch the damned show, etc. And most people don't find fiddling with Wine settings and other "technical" things to be excessively entertaining.

Re:If it weren't for games

[Anonymous Coward]

I upgraded from 7 to win 10 precisely because the games I play run better. It was only the first month or so that games ran worse while the as usual lagging video drivers from AMD and Nvidia came up to speed.

Re:If it weren't for games

[RogueyWon]

Indeed. The role of games in cementing MS's domination on the desktop is often overlooked. But it's games that keep the general public running Windows on their home PC (whether for themselves or for family members). And it's the fact that pretty much everybody uses Windows at home that means that businesses and Governments know that they can save a lot of time and money on staff training by using Windows, as everybody will just know how to use it.

The irony is that MS just spent more than a decade trying to downplay PC/Windows gaming, by throwing out a competitor to it in the shape of the Xbox line. What's interesting is that since Phil Spencer took over MS's gaming operations, he's swung the focus heavily back onto PC gaming (implying, I think, that he "gets it"). We hear a lot less about "Xbox exclusives" these days and a lot more about "Xbox/Win10 exclusives").

And no, Linux gaming is not even vaguely close to being an acceptable replacement for Windows gaming at the moment. A good chunk of PC gamers use the platform because it allows them to run the latest titles with better performance and visual fidelity than the consoles. Telling them to use an OS where they'll be mostly limited to older games and crappy driver support isn't going to cut it.

Valve have been trying hard to push it, as they know that in the long-term, having their platform be dependent upon a competitor's OS isn't a good business strategy. They got a nasty shock from Win8's app store, until it turned out to be shite. But the jury is very much still out on whether Valve are going to make serious headway with SteamOS. They've got a lot of work to do to convince publishers and hardware manufacturers.

Or maybe they guessed

[wonkey_monkey]

Microsoft is also monitoring how long people are using the operating system.

Wow. That sounds like a pretty certain statement of fact...

Microsoft must have been logging individuals' usage times

That sounds less certain.

Maybe they simply know when people installed Windows 10 and what the average computer use per day is (from their own studies), and, actually, "11 billion hours" is not meant to be taken as particularly accurate.

Cool Story....

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft has been logging your usage time since a long time ago, even Windows XP had that "feature". Possibly the older windows as well.
Even games are doing this, why are you up in arms for this garbage? Time used means NOTHING. It's no info. You could literally leave the PC on overnight while you sleep and it'd count.

Re: Windows 10 is just a giant spyware

[TheReaperD]

Sadly, if you use hardware or software that requires Windows and the internet, you're hosed at this point. WinXP is no longer really internet safe and most of the privacy screwing aspects of Windows 10 have been back-ported to Windows 7/8 through updates.

Re:Why don't they publish reinstalls ...

[LVSlushdat]

You know the funny part?.. I've installed the latest ISO of the November update, using an OEM Windows 7 Pro product key I had laying around on a spare laptop drive in one of my laptops. I went thru turning off all the cutesy-toosie privacy destroying toggle switches during the install instead of going with the "recommeneded"
defaults, including all of the additional steps done in gpedit.msc, went with a local account vs an MS account. From a lot of articles I've read, that *allegedly* disables nearly all of the more egregious crap.. Note I said "alledgedly"... After loading a copy of rpcapd on my Tomato router and firing up Wireshark and pointing it at the rpcapd instance on the router, I still see this fuckin' Microsoft abortion yammering away at a good number of the listed (in many articles) MS endpoints. In other words, It appears to me, that MS is gonna vacumn up your data come hell or high-water, even if you believe you've "castrated" the fucker.. I guess the only way to prevent this pile of shit from phoning home is to block *.microsoft.com in your hardware firewall... You *do* have one, don't you??? Sooooooooo fuckin' glad I moved all my systems to Linux about 5 years ago.... The *only* reason I was trying out Win10 was the fact that I *know* I'm gonna be pestered by friends/family to support this pile of shit, so I figured I'd play with it a while....... (shudders)...

I'm not exactly fond of it, but ....

[King_TJ]

I think it's pretty well publicized that Windows 10 chatters with Microsoft servers quite a bit. It's now even coming to light that new PCs with Win 10 preloaded on them are shipped with the disk encryption feature enabled already, and a copy of the master key for the encryption housed on Microsoft's servers. (If you want to use encryption but not have MS hold on to a master key for it, you have to turn it back off, wait a while for it to complete, and do it all over again, choosing the correct options to keep a key yourself but not to upload one to them.)

The thing is, the average/typical user doesn't CARE that any of this is taking place. The fact that MS holds a key for the encryption means when Joe Sixpack user screws up and locks himself out of his own drive, he can actually get MS support people to unlock it for him. That's more useful in his "real world" scenario than the concern that MS could pass his master key along to the NSA or FBI, who might in turn look at his hard drive full of poorly written Word documents, his country music collection and his stupid drunk party photos, plus his Windows wallpaper backgrounds of his favorite porn stars.

The relative minority who actually concern ourselves with online privacy rights are obviously not a crowd Microsoft really targets or cares much about. If it's that big a deal, you probably need to use something like Linux.

Re:I'm not exactly fond of it, but ....

[Anonymous Coward]

"The thing is, the average/typical user doesn't CARE that any of this is taking place."

Let me fix that for you:
"The thing is, the average/typical user doesn't KNOW that any of this is taking place."

There's a damn good reason Microsoft hides these features behind misleading buttons.

e.g. ""do you want to use Cortana's assistance" (select Yes and it sends your browser history to Microsoft, yes is selected by default BTW, selecting No and your browser history is *still* send unless you correctly set all the other options that send this).

"Use page prediction to speed up browsing, improve reading, and make my overall experience better"
What's hiding behind there?.... Another excuse to send your browser history to Microsoft.

You can see why people don't know. Microsoft deliberately misleads people hiding the surveillance in embedded wording.

That encryption key it sends to Microsoft, even experts like us didn't spot that till someone noticed it! How many other surprises are we in for?

Re:I'm not exactly fond of it, but ....

[Slashdot Junky]

average/typical user doesn't CARE that any of this is taking place

Joe Sixpack might care if he knew and understood what was happening. He doesn't, because Microsoft and every other damn shading business and entity out there that is abusing him doesn't make clear their practices. This is all made worse, because far too many businesses have abusive policies. They all justify them internally by believing that it is okay since "all" their competitors are abusing. The consumer all too often doesn't have practical alternatives. So, simply leaving the correction to the market is not the right approach.