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France: Windows 10 Collects 'Excessive Personal Data', Issues Microsoft With Formal Warning (betanews.com)
France's National Data Protection Commission (CNIL) has ordered Microsoft to "stop collecting excessive data and tracking browsing by users without consent," adding that Microsoft must comply with the French Data Protection Act within next three months. BetaNews reports: In addition to this, the chair of CNIL has notified Microsoft that it needs to take "satisfactory measures to ensure the security and confidentiality of user data." The notice comes after numerous complaints about Windows 10, and a series of investigations by French authorities which revealed a number of failings on Microsoft's part. Microsoft is accused of not only gathering excessive data about users, but also irrelevant data. The CNIL points to Windows 10's telemetry service which gathers information about the apps users have installed and how long each is used for. The complaint is that "these data are not necessary for the operation of the service."
france will become silent and declare ms is a strategic partner in fighting terrorism. Until then, it intrudes privacy.
Anyway, everybody who wants to protect their data should use linux.
It's perfectly fine that Microsoft spies on you because Windows 10 is free! Unlike evil GOOGLE, who reads your email to find people who do things they don't like!
God, I'm tired of refuting this stupid shill argument. Google's services are free. They tell you explicitly what they do with your data. Google does not have a monopoly on email, you're free to use many other providers. Since I'm concerned about my privacy, I only use gmail as a spam box.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has been evasive and deceptive about collecting peoples' data, completely silent about what they *do* with that information, and they collect all this info by leveraging their de facto monopoly on the desktop OS market (yes, you can use macOS or GNU, but billions of dollars of legacy Win32 programs and contracts are wrapped up on Microsoft's end, and so switching is not so simple for the privacy-concerned).
Most likely this will result in nothing, but I'm really, really hopeful that more countries will band together with France on this and hit Microsoft with some considerable sanctions, and switch off of Windows.
At the very least, this is something I can show to aggravating Microsoft fans/shills who are still in complete denial about the Orwellian nature of Windows 10.
apps users have installed and how long each is used for... is not irrelevant at all.
This is why, despite the apparent bloat, all applications should be completely self contained (portable, sandboxed, kinda) in their own folders (statically linked). So when you toss the folder, all traces of the app are gone with it. The old Macs were sort of like that. But with Microsoft, and Linux to an extent, they take a shotgun to your drive and then fill in the holes, splattering the application all over the place. It's kind of incestuous the way everything mixes up together. Apps that you don't even know about, running in the background cause many mysterious crashes. Sending the black box info to Microsoft has become necessary.
I just run a personalized live system now. Boots factory fresh every time.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Apple Mail: using IMAP to my mail servers, pings 3 different apple servers while processing any new incoming email. NOWHERE in the chain does Apple need to be involved. Use any push service and they all much use Apple's control panel, and they all ping Apple servers right alongside whatever service you're using. Apple's official reason: "Ensure product is up to date and to cross reference any known security issues." That could just be done via a single update, say daily, completely unrelated to my personal accounts.
They're all doing it and all in some sort of shitty dog race to see who can be the biggest asshole of the lot.
re: point 2. I know dell sells Linux laptops, I know some 3rd party ODM resellers sell linux laptops. But go to a brick and mortar and find me one. Go to dell.com and find them without diving really really deep into their website. Go to lenovo.com or acer.com and find me one at all. They ARE hard to find. MS encourages that practice.
But ok, I do have a comment: how come nobody in the EU is looking into the criminal activities of how Microsoft shoved Windows 10 down people's throats?
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Peoples browsing/application/usage habits are unique enough that any generated random ID will be just as good and can likely uniquely identify an individual with very high accuracy. You've swapped one identifier for another. Privacy through obscurity?
I doubt swapping a user identifier (first.last, userid, whatever...) for an advertising ID will work. After all, Facebook tracks you by generating a random ID for every visit to a page that has a like button. If you are signed in, that page visit is tracked by them. If you sign in later, that page visit is retroactively added to your history. If you create an account later, that random ID is then merged with your account.
Similarly, I almost never sign into any google stuff other than the infrequent email that for whatever reason I can't get on Thunderbird or my phone. Yet the ads I see when I do sign into gmail are for those same items I searched for days/weeks ago. Though with a phone, Google tracks your location too. I seem to remember there being a patent on location-based coupons being sent to user phones some time ago...
But they arn't.
Have you looked at the sheer amount of shovelware the average PC comes with? It's breathtaking. And a lot of it can be oddball stuff that you've never heard of before, by manufacturers you may well not have heard of. So you are forced to either reinstall the OS from scratch so you have a known clean system, or you have to vet every odd thing you find in your Programs and Features window, and even then hope that there is nothing else installed. And hopefully that's the end of it, which may not be the case. Lenovo has already been caught shoving insecure crapware into the UEFI bios that windows will automatically install whether you want it or not.
Unless you purchase the Enterprise version of Windows 10, you cannot disable telemetry. Period. You cannot disable updates. Period. Microsoft also has the power to extract any and all data from your machine, remotely, without needing your consent first. You flat out do not have control of your own computer anymore if you use Windows 10. And incidentally, some US gov't judge has declared that people no longer have an expectation of privacy when using their computers in their own home. You do the math there.
Is someone whose computer suddenly upgraded to Windows 10 going to read the EULA bit-by-bit, especially when eyes glaze over at daunting EULA's so easily that they have given up their first born technically? No, their computer isn't working and they need to get in NOW, so they click OK.
Plus even if it uninstalls, it's never going to be the same again. Windows 10 probably tore out who knows what doing the unwanted upgrade.
And let's never mind the fact that Windows 10 is being dumped on just about every Intel computer out there, and your choices are pretty much either ridiculously expensive, draconian, or very difficult for an end-user to use. That's like being given arsenic, and being told that if you don't like it, you're free to choose cyanide or stab yourself and get gangrene over a few weeks, when you really don't particularly want to poison yourself at all.
Plus the fact that the OS is a specially privileged piece of software. It's like security cameras on the street versus one in your bathroom that you can't remove.
I'm no fan of Google's. They're pulling all kinds of horrid shit. But Microsoft is on a new level. And it really doesn't matter if people dogpile Microsoft more than Google. The fact that Google does terrible things but gets less flack does not excuse Microsoft in the least, and that is a crappy argument. Plus Google is better known for its search engine, so it gets flack there, whereas Microsoft is best known for Windows, so most of its flack goes there, accordingly.
Bottom line is that Microsoft is on the forefront of the movement that wants to own the device you paid for and everything you do with it, not unlike most phone manufacturers as well as tractor manufacturers
Of course they can.
There already are special versions of Windows available - there's the "K" ones, which are specially made for Korea (not sure what it entails), and there's the "N" ones which lack media player (earlier Europe ruling).
All Microsoft needs to do is modify the N build to exclude data collection or ask for user permission to collect data.
You can see these builds when you make a Windows 10 image and click Advanced.
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