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Microsoft Finally Reveals What Data Windows 10 Really Collects (theverge.com)
Starting today, Microsoft is updating its privacy statement and publishing information about the data it collects as part of Windows 10. From a report: "For the first time, we have published a complete list of the diagnostic data collected at the Basic level," explains Windows chief Terry Myerson in a company blog post. "We are also providing a detailed summary of the data we collect from users at both Basic and Full levels of diagnostics." Microsoft is introducing better controls around its Windows 10 data collection levels in the latest Creators Update, which will start rolling out broadly next week. The controls allow users to switch between basic and full levels of data collection. "Our teams have also worked diligently since the Anniversary Update to re-assess what data is strictly necessary at the Basic level to keep Windows 10 devices up to date and secure," says Myerson. "As a result, we have reduced the number of events collected and reduced, by about half, the volume of data we collect at the Basic level."
... of course, is that we have to wait for Microsoft to "inform" us about that in the first place.
Finally, since January. They revealed this in January when they pushed the update to Insiders Build. They introduced the disclosure as part of compliance with EU regulations.
Link to the actual list, not an article about the list: https://technet.microsoft.com/...
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
that this list is really complete and conclusive? Or is this just what MS is saying is the complete list?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Why can't we turn it off entirely? I can troubleshoot my own PC and don't need it "phoning home" - EVER.
We all know that without the source, it is impossible to verify their claims.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
"Our teams have also worked diligently since the Anniversary Update to re-assess what data is strictly necessary at the Basic level to keep Windows 10 devices up to date and secure," says Myerson. "As a result, we have reduced the number of events collected and reduced, by about half, the volume of data we collect at the Basic level."
I wonder what they felt they needed to remove before they were willing to publish the disclosure.
They are transparent about the Creator's Update. But they have reduced the telemetry by about half, saying that they realized they didn't find all telemetry useful. So you don't really know what they *have been* collecting prior to the Creator's Update. For all we know they've removed a bunch of more onerous details that could have *upset* us.
Some open source supporters will make claims like "But they're being transparent!" or "But you can opt out!" or some other nonsense like that.
But guess what? None of that matters!
It does matter. It's relatively trivial to opt out of Mozilla's data collection and to know what's being collected, whereas that's absolutely not the case with Microsoft. So when you say shit like this:
"we cannot consider them to be any better than Windows, or conversely, we can't consider Windows to be any worse than projects like Firefox"
I know you're either shilling for Microsoft or being idealistically stupid about practical differences.
Look at the f*cking thing and see how reasonable it is:
https://technet.microsoft.com/...
It's completely ridiculous. Windows 10 is basically spyware disguised as an OS at this point.
You should look into the msdn historical edit article where they showed that microsoft removed verbiage on it's MSDN page about collecting even worse information such as your documents and allowing microsoft employees investigating any crash reports sent by your machine to actually remotely access your machine and view your documents and run your programs.
Not trolling either. It was a link passed around here awhile ago and microsoft even sent a takedown to the wayback machine which previously had the edit but now does not. Yet on a different microsoft site that lists wiki-style diff's of it's pages, it's still there.
Someone find it please. They are backpedaling so hard on this it's sad.
All incidents of data harvesting are equally wrong.
No, the world is not black and white. Otherwise Richard Stallman would be a practical person instead of out on an idealistic island. People like Stallman are useful as standard bearers, but in the real world we deal with practical choices that require us to distinguish between varying degrees of "wrong".
We're rolling out Windows 10 in a very low-bandwidth environment, and in some cases a no-bandwidth environment. (Yes, they still exist today!) Turning off telemetry was one of the reasons we upgraded the OEM licenses from Pro to Enterprise -- there's just no need to use precious connection time sending usage data to Microsoft. And yes, that means "paying twice" for the OS, once to the OEM and once for the Enterprise subscription.
In my opinion, Microsoft did a very poor job of communicating what the difference between Home, Pro and Enterprise was. Basically, anyone with Home and Pro is getting the OS for "free" in exchange for telemetry data and information they can sell to marketers, period. Pro is Home with the ability to join a classic AD domain. This is very different from the days of Windows 7, where Pro had enough features to make it the default OS for business deployment. What Microsoft is doing is pulling more and more features under Enterprise, including the ability to opt out of constant feature changes. The result is that most large companies are buying Enterprise upgrades and getting on the subscription treadmill.
I think the best thing they could do right now is to let anybody buy the Enterprise version as a one-off, or make a complete shut-off of the telemetry available but slightly difficult to find in every edition of the OS. Even if they made the telemetry controllable by a few hard to find registry keys, the vast majority of consumers wouldn't touch any of the default settings and they'd still be getting data from them. Microsoft just got done "giving away" Windows 10 to millions of Windows 7 and 8 users in the form of the free upgrade, and the indication is that they will be on the same major release forever from now on, just releasing big update packages once or twice a year. Enterprise customers are subsidizing this development by still paying license fees in the form of subscriptions -- those millions of PCs that were upgraded for free only have the revenue stream of the marketing data coming in until they're replaced. And if Microsoft sticks to their promises, there will be no more revenue for traditional boxed software upgrades either -- no Windows 11 release they can ship out on DVDs to stores is coming.
Do I like being a product for marketing companies to mine data on? Not really -- and I do think Microsoft should be transparent about why they're doing what they're doing. I think all the companies doing this (Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc.) are going to have to find a new way to operate once the social media and advertising bubbles pop too...right now all of them are subsidizing their phone OS development with the fact that they have access to very personal data on a device you carry with you 24 hours a day.
The justifications offered by MS are as ridiculous as they are hilarious.
"Activity for run of the Transient Account Manager that determines if any user accounts should be deleted for devices set up for Shared PC mode to help keep Windows up to date. Deleting unused user accounts on shared devices frees up disk space to improve Windows Update success rates"
Seriously so you have to know how many local accounts, when I add, change and remove them. When they first login and their sids I keep on my own machine because there is some insanely comical correlation between local accounts and available disk space?
It's not like you are not already explicitly stealing volume information via Census.Storage and SetupPlatformTel.SetupPlatformTelActivityEvent. And who the fuck installs software without check for available disk space first? Is the success rate of an action really undeterminable prior to taking it because disk space? I don't think even Microsoft is stupid enough to believe their own BS.
Also love the generic key/value data access schemes where the full list of available keys that can be transmitted are not specified anywhere.. Only the top level interface to transfer the data.
FieldName - Retrieves the event name/data point.
Value - Retrieves the value associated with the corresponding event name
If your going to be transparent don't be transparently slimy. You may impress end users with better things to do with reams of context deprived technobabble but there are plenty of people in the world as smart or smarter than the people who compiled this crap.
Apple and Microsoft have probably been the best major companies for keeping their changes small and manageable. Eventually you had to migrate off VB6. Eventually you had to click the "also compile this for Intel" checkbox in Xcode. But that doesn't change the fact that if you use their platforms, you are subject to their business decisions, even when they conflict with yours.
Perhaps hypocritically, I'm typing this on a Mac. I've decided that given Apple's track record, they're probably not going to yank the rug out from under me overnight. But you can bet that all the code I write is in FOSS languages and deployed to FOSS operating systems. I can change my desktop OS - with some pain and gnashing of teeth to be sure - without compromising the things I design. That's because RMS is correct: he's convinced many of us that it's practical to choose open platforms instead of closed shininess where it really matters.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
At the very least, they admit that they:
- Uniquely identify you, your device, and your location/network.
- Record what you navigate and search on the internet.
- Record what you watch, listen to, and read.
- Record your purchase history.
Any citations for these (like field names in that huge list) that you could provide? I searched for some keywords to find anything related what you mentioned (ex: web, browse, history, internet, purchase, etc) and could not find anything as nefarious sounding as your summary. Perhaps I'm not looking closely enough and it's a huge list, so citations would be appreciated. I really would like to know if they are collecting the info you listed. Thanks.