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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.
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.
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.
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
LUDDITE Linux?
You can't drop a nugget like that without link to an ISO or a torrent!
I can't wait to see the version names...
Awesome Antique
Busy Broom
Cheerful Churn
Delightful Duster...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
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.
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.
Right, I forgot most humans die due to PC gaming deficiency. Microsoft has the big budget EA games that are required to prevent PC Gaming malnourishment related deaths that plagued mankind for centuries. I guess there's nothing to be done then.
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.
If your computer is so unsafe that one update missed makes it a menace to everyone on the internet, it is not even remotely the users fault. If many of the updates make your computer inoperative, or it stops doing what you bought it for, It isn't much of an operating system.
People buy computers to do thing on, and the main purpose is to do those things, not receive updates because the OS is inherently non-secure.
I update my Linux and MacOS machines soon after the updates are available. I hold off on Windows as long as possible.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.