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EU Privacy Watchdogs Say Windows 10 Settings Still Raise Concerns (reuters.com)
Julia Fioretti, reporting for Reuters: European Union data protection watchdogs said on Monday they were still concerned about the privacy settings of Microsoft's Windows 10 operating system despite the U.S. company announcing changes to the installation process. The watchdogs, a group made up of the EU's 28 authorities responsible for enforcing data protection law, wrote to Microsoft last year expressing concerns about the default installation settings of Windows 10 and users' apparent lack of control over the company's processing of their data. The group -- referred to as the Article 29 Working Party -- asked for more explanation of Microsoft's processing of personal data for various purposes, including advertising. "In light of the above, which are separate to the results of ongoing inquiries at a national level, even considering the proposed changes to Windows 10, the Working Party remains concerned about the level of protection of users' personal data," the group said in a statement which also acknowledged Microsoft's willingness to cooperate.
It shouldn't be collecting data of any kind unless you opt to submit crash reports
Twinstiq, game news
The only way for the Privacy of EU Citizens to be assured of Privacy in the EU is for EU Governments to ban the Use of Windows 10. The entire OS is Spyware. Full stop.
Microsoft's refusal to allow us to turn off their intrusions smacks of incredible arrogance but their 90% domination of the PC market means most of us are stuck with them anyway. It's time for the EU to step in with a bat and end the Microsoft Monopoly with a Ma Bell style break-up.
When consumers can pick between a Windows that's riddled with spyware, and one that isn't, then they will finally have a choice.
My #1 complaint on Win10, over the telemetry and touch oriented interface, is the fact that whenever I open my laptop I never know if it will have rebooted or not.
I don't understand how M$ can think it's ok to reboot my laptop without first getting my consent. If it weren't for a couple programs I need Windows for I'd have 2 laptops running Linux, instead of just 1.
There are many tools to help with this... Spybot has a nice one (anti-beacon). There is also a plethora of information of Microsoft's telemetry targets that can be zero-routed to take care of most of it but yes it is a lot of overhead for the average person or small/medium business. Sadly it isn't just Windows 10.. its office 2016/365 as well and I'm not sure how much is scraped from Cortana and Edge.
Interesting to note how much Google is spending on bribing (aka "lobbying") the EU.
Not to mention the US.
But of course, both Microsoft and Google should be publicly shamed for using their users and leaching them of their private lives.
The EU is just mad that they're too stupid to know how to use appy Appdows 10, the appiest apperating app, so they want to force people to use LUDDITE Windows 7 and LUDDITE Linux!
Apps!
We need to create an app called "GIGO". We'd give it a mascot, maybe a big yellow friendly llama, with a long tail and pointy ears grinning. Make it look like some poindexter that cannot shut the heck up.
Upon installing, it asks you for a personality; neurotic Nancy, paranoid Paul, Bodacious Bob, and so forth. It then turns on every conceivable tracking option and signs up for every account Microsoft wants you to like a good little MS Drone.
It does bing searches for random key words, logs into random websites, turns on every conceivable tracking option, it browses sites like Salon, looks for sentences with a ? at the end, then copies and pastes them into Cortana then randomly clicks on a link, over and over and over again. It brings up youtube videos, enables audio loopback, and plays speeches back to microsoft off of youtube. It would browse twitter, and reddit, and 4chan, and and wet sweaty armpits of google image search, download random pictures, then rename them similar to digital camera files, while changing the color, pitch, resolution and so forth slightly each time, and upload them to onedrive; if it's neurotic nancy she uploads and deletes a gig of crap every week. If it's paranoid paul, he only puts a few images a day up, and also copies and pastes random sentences from books together.
In other words, we'd build a bot to harass Microsoft. A team of people would get together and determine what the next thing to feed Microsoft would be. Every month we'd do another kick starter; vote with your dollars to hire people to find and photo shop pictures of Microsoft employee's as Borg drones and upload them to the mother-ship. Upload tons of cat picks to Microsoft but in every conceivable spelling and mis-spelling of pussy.
The ultimate goal would be, since Microsoft has decided AI is the future and everything they do is pointless, we'll simply feed Microsoft a never-ending stream of complete, utter, and total dog sh!# data. We'd want to get to the point of ridiculousness where Microsoft has to sue the app creators for damages or ask the FBI to arrest them for hacking, but the only real hacking going on is they're enabling the automation of friendly GIGO, talking about whatever people wanted GIGO to talk to Microsoft about. We'd advertise GIGO as "A friendly computer use assistant that makes your computer feel loved by using it when you aren't".
That's what needs to happen here. Fatten the hog on garbage, then slaughter it.
There are many tools to help with this....
you had to get a harley davidson, so you tore down the whole house and rebuilt it so that you could have a garage capable of containing the continuous oil leak
dont buy microsoft windows 10, buy a computer without windows that has Linux pre-installed or install your favorite flavor of Linux.
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I was constantly fighting my computer when it was running Windows 10.
Disabling annoying telemetry stuff (only to be re-enabled by some random patch), trying to constantly kill Windows Update so it didn't force a reboot in the middle of something important (only to have that re-enabled by some random patch as well), etc.
I went from "hey, this is a pretty reliable machine I can actually rely on for daily use" to "what the fuck is Microsoft going to screw up today and cost me an hour or two of work to fix?".
In the end, it wasn't worth it. Reverted to Windows 7, haven't looked back. I don't really know what I'm going to do when they fuck up Windows 7 just as badly or try to depreciate it, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. It'd sure be nice if ReactOS was capable and stable enough to run x64_64 applications, and enough of them that I could use it as a daily driver.
"Just Trust Us, Dammit!"
-- Satya Nadella
Microsoft has re-purposed Windows. No longer is Windows main functionality an operating system. Windows has become the basis for egregiously extensive data collection. The sooner everyone who uses Windows realizes that, the sooner they will stop trying to keep Windows in the past when it was actually a useful operating system.
If it ain't sexy, it ain't getting written.
Agreed as far as it applies to OSes, free services online not so much, you get what you pay for
Twinstiq, game news
Microsoft is rather stupid. Everything to do with ads, spying etc. is run through Bing. So as a general principle I block Bing at my firewall. Of course the Windows 10 machine tries phoning home frequently and I see it in the firewall logs.
If and when you choose to update
If your computer is connected to the Internet, and you choose not to update, and a computer intruder takes advantage of this choice to surreptitiously install a botnet worker on your computer, how shall users of computers other than yours be protected from attacks originating from your computer? Automatic updates provide the counterpart to herd immunity.
citizens have a right to vote in democracies, and corporations don't.
That depends on regulation of political speech, as citizens who lack the time to do extensive research into all candidates for a particular office are vulnerable to being influenced by other citizens' speech through the mass media.
Here in the United States, the First Amendment recognizes citizens' right to speak for or against a particular candidate for office. And citizens have a right to form corporations for the purpose of furthering such speech; these are called IEOPACs (independent expenditures only political action committees) or "super PACs". How is political speech regulated in the countries of the European Union?
Of course, citizens have the right to chose to run Linux or FreeBSD as well.
On what hardware? Do citizens have the right to affordable hardware that runs an operating system that respects users' privacy? If citizens are faced with a choice between 300 EUR for a PC whose operating system does not respect users' privacy and 3,000 EUR for a comparable PC whose does, is this a desirable outcome for public policy?
So you don't set your reboot settings correctly
It appears that for some, there is no "correctly". I've read stories of Windows 10 refusing to accept "active hours" that cross midnight local time or that span more than twelve hours, such as the sixteen hours from morning to bedtime when a home PC might be used by at least one member of the household.
Start now by using the same Free and Open Source Software on Windows as you will be using under Linux (to the extent that it is available on Windows).
And often it isn't.
Case in point: What free paint program for Windows or X11/Linux has a feature comparable to "adjustment layers" in Photoshop? An adjustment layer is a copy of the layers below it with some filter automatically run on it, which updates automatically whenever a layer below it changes. I couldn't find any way to make an adjustment layer in GIMP 2.8.16, which ships with Xubuntu 16.04 LTS.
Are those other people unpatched too?
For one thing, patches are ineffective against a bandwidth consumption attack. For another, I'm told a lot of these attacks target Internet-exposed devices other than PCs, such as modem-routers and older smartphones. An ISP subscriber might not have authority to make and apply updates to the modem-router that the subscriber is leasing from the ISP, and the ISP might have neglected to do so. Or an update might not exist at all.
what happens when the attacker takes advantage of a vulnerability that is introduced by an update?
Is this nearly as common as an update removing a vulnerability?
For one thing, patches are ineffective against a bandwidth consumption attack.
Then updates don't matter and shouldn't be forced.
For another, I'm told a lot of these attacks target Internet-exposed devices other than PCs, such as modem-routers and older smartphones.
Then that has nothing to do with Windows updates and they shouldn't be forced.
Is this nearly as common as an update removing a vulnerability?
Are they not? How do you think new vulnerabilities come about?
Bottom line: The user is the only person who should get a say in what happens on their computer. These forced updates that Microsoft are doing should be illegal and the people in charge of implementing them should be in prison for unlawful access to millions of computer systems.
For one thing, patches are ineffective against a bandwidth consumption attack.
Then updates don't matter and shouldn't be forced.
I was unclear. Against a bandwidth consumption attack, patches to the machine that is the ultimate target of the attack are ineffective, but patches to the machine that would form part of the botnet are effective.
I'm told a lot of these attacks target Internet-exposed devices other than PCs, such as modem-routers and older smartphones.
Then that has nothing to do with Windows updates and they shouldn't be forced.
They have much to do with Windows updates if a botnet is used to "target Internet-exposed devices other than PCs", and the machines that would form part of the botnet run Windows.
How do you think new vulnerabilities come about?
New vulnerabilities tend to be introduced with new functionality, not with patches focused solely on security.
The user is the only person who should get a say in what happens on their computer.
By that reasoning, the user should be held responsible and liable for all use of the user's computer as a botnet agent. If someone adds your unpatched computer to his botnet, and someone uses your computer to DDoS someone, you should go to jail for recklessly participating in said DDoS.