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Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking
- roughcoder 11y agoLink to blog post https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2016/01/04/windows-10-now-active-on-over-200-million-devices/ https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2016/01/04/windo...
- Spone 11y agoThey reveal figures from the tracking, but nothing about privacy nor how it can be disabled...
- jlgaddis 11y agoWow, makes me glad that I don't use operating systems that track every little thing I do!
- chinathrow 11y agoWhich would be what OS?
- pc86 11y agoWindows 95
- krisdol 11y agoNot parent, but W10 convinced to me commit to using only Linux at home. Used to be Linux-exclusive for years in college, so I figure why not. My work and portables are all OS X, which is still far more privacy conscious than W10.
- MollyR 11y agoI agree. At work I'm forced to use windows and osx (supporting enterprise users), but I've begun testing various linux os's (mint,arch,elementary) as preparation to leave windows behind for personal use. I've actually found it to be liberating in a weird way.
- junto 11y agoHave you found a favourite distro? I started using Ubuntu a couple of years ago on my home laptop, but when that new design came out with that horrible big side bar, I kind of gave up on it. I also ended up buying a new laptop that came with Windows 7 so the Ubuntu one sits in the attic rotting. Still, I'm still tempted to move back to a good GUI based Linux distro if I can find one. I just haven't got the time these days to start installing different ones and testing then out.
- noir_lord 11y agoI use Xubuntu on Work PC, Home PC, Media PC and Laptop. I love XFCE, It's fast, stable, easily configured, uses normal GTK stuff so fits with the Gnome apps, is a regular plain old desktop (main menu, window buttons/taskbar). Mostly the thing I like about XFCE is I don't have to think about it, it just does it's thing, stays out of my way and doesn't break a user interface covenant I'm used to all the way back to Win95. Of course you can run XFCE on pretty much any distro but the Xubuntu folks do an excellent job of packaging it all up and having access to Ubuntu's PPA's is a big win since pretty much everything is packaged for it.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- x0 11y agoSystem V
- ionised 11y agoDebian?
- akerro 11y agoHardened Gentoo? *BSD? ArchLinux? They still come with some kind of tracking, like Chromium downloads binary blob that manages your microphone, or Firefox that includes telemetry and crash reporting, but at least you can easily recompile Fx without pocket, WebRTC etc. which you can't do in Win10.
- mattkevan 11y agoRiscOS
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- solidninja 11y agoSigh I really wish it was easier to use a non-tracking OS. Personally, I use Hardened Gentoo and actively avoid downloading binaries + a lot of other tweaks to the "standard" Linux setup to patch what I see as obvious holes. Perhaps I need to elaborate more on a blog post. It is very inconvenient yet for me I accept it as a price worth paying. The great thing about Linux though is that there are many middle roads. On one hand, you could just use Ubuntu (hey, they even turned off the tracking stuff in 15.10) and the Tor Browser, and then you've pretty much eliminated most of the casual advertiser-level tracking (if you follow basic hygiene). On the other, you could go and build your own custom distribution with packages audited by you and always built from source, only after having verified personally all the developers' GPG keys...
- jlgaddis 11y agoOpenBSD and FreeBSD, primarily.
- jinst8gmi 11y ago"44.5 billion minutes spent by users in the Microsoft Edge browser across Windows 10 devices" I wonder how much of that was spent downloading Firefox or Chrome? "30% more Bing search queries per Windows 10 device versus previous versions of the OS" I can't imagine that this is due to anything other than the OS and browser defaults?
- akerro 11y agoAren't Bing searches included when you search for local files?
- cptskippy 11y agoYes, so that should give you an idea of how often people are searching from the task bar.
- soylentcola 11y agoOnly if enabled. It's a tick box in the settings menu for "search" that I've disabled since it was introduced in Win8. I'm sure it's useful for some people since they typically open a browser to search more often than they search for local files (and Microsoft wants people to use their services). Still, for me, web results just get in the way of local searches and I'm used to typing in the Start/Win menu for local, not web so new installs get their options adjusted accordingly.
- maccard 11y ago"30% more Bing search queries per Windows 10 device versus previous versions of the OS" wasn't IE/Bing the default in previous versions of the OS too?
- tomswartz07 11y agoHere's a 100% serious question: If you 'absolutely must' use Windows 10, would it be possible to firewall off every outbound port from this machine to prevent this sort of tracking? Or does it just use Port 80, piggybacking on the normal http traffic? Has anyone done a comprehensive analysis of exactly how this info is being sent?
- ionised 11y agoI doubt you could with Windows Firewall, but my firewall (Comodo) seems to do the job. You can find all the known domains and addresses for the Microsoft telemetry and advertising networks through some searching online. I added them all to my hosts file as well as block lists in Comodo Firewall. I did both because I assume Microsoft has wired access for some of these services in such a way that the hosts file would be ignored, as well as Windows Firewall. I have my firewall also set to request user action on EVERY outgoing connection (all incoming stealthed, so no open or closed response) and so far all I have allowed out in terms of Windows processes is Windows Update. I haven't even allowed the error reporting. The OS is still ticking along just fine. Honestly though this whole approach they ahve taken with Windows 10 has really turned me off. It reeks of anti-consumerism. I basically just use this Windows 10 machine as a gaming machine now, and all my personal and professional computing is done on a separate Debian machine. Microsoft won't be getting another penny from me for anything ever again.
- delinka 11y ago"Piggybacking"? Presumably, they're hitting a REST API served up on an HTTP server on port 80 or 443 (hopefully 443...) And sure - stick it behind a NAT, learn the servers that the systems reports to, block those (or set up your own DNS); nothing that the average mainstream consumer is capable of doing.
- xgbi 11y agoThe IPs are hardcoded in windows ethernet driver, no shit.. So yeah, spoffing it through DNS won't work. You have to have a physicall firewall between your PC and the internet and target these specific IPs to block efficiently.
- mikegerwitz 11y agoLet's start gathering statistics on how many times people open their refrigerator, or use the toilet, or take a shower. What's more concerning about these data aren't these specific numbers, but what other data that implies that they have, what they can do with it, and what they can infer about you from it. Privacy and anonymity aren't (reasonably) possible on a Windows 10 operating system. Any entity knowing that I have even turned on my PC---without explicit action to notify someone of such, such as posting this message or sending e-mail---is a privacy violation.
- sz4kerto 11y agoYou bet that the smart-toilet manufacturers will track the usage. :/
- ourmandave 11y agoMy wife tracks how many times I don't put the lid down.
- cm2187 11y agoWhat I would like to know if how much of this tracking is not blocked by installing something like Spybot's Anti-Beacon (https://www.safer-networking.org/spybot-anti-beacon/ https://www.safer-networking.org/spybot-anti-beacon/) and using a Local Account. If all it takes is to install a similar tool when I buy a new machine, it's not a big deal. There are many other tools I need to install anyway (winrar, etc).
- andrewchambers 11y agoyou don't need winrar, 7zip is far better.
- talmand 11y agoYou don't need 7zip, it's much better to unpack manually.
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- caskance 11y agoThis is an insanely stupid title for an article that is essentially blogspam.
- MikeNomad 11y agoNot having read the EULA / Terms of Service (I don't run Windows 10), Would running a script to turn off / block the tracking and data collection violate the agreements?
- skrowl 11y agoHKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\DataCollection add a new 32 dword "AllowTelemetry" and set the value to 0. Then, open Services and stop & change startup to disabled on "Connected User Experiences and Telemetry" and "dmwappushservice". There are bunches of tools and scripts around to do it, but those 2 things are really all that you need to do. Microsoft doesn't stop you from "opting out" of Telemetry by making these changes. All windows updates / etc still work.
- ionised 11y agoI'm pretty sure some reporting and telemetry is still active even after doing those things, unless you run Windows 10 Enterprise. You can get around that by blocking it with a (non-Microsoft) firewall though.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- akerro 11y agoGet TronScript https://www.reddit.com/r/TronScript/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TronScript/
- DanBC 11y agoWhen your start menu (or whatever the hell it's called now) serves you ads you know you can give up on that OS and that the vendor does not care about the user.
- crummy 11y agoLike Ubuntu?
- TeMPOraL 11y agoYup. What the hell are these people thinking? That an operating system is a shopping mall?... ... and they're probably right anyway. Computing went mainstream, people who need tools and not toys are niche now, and mass market doesn't cater to niches.
- LesZedCB 11y agoAnd worse is that the only reason I have windows in the first place is to play games. I don't need to do anything else on it, but I have to have it in my life because big game companies will not make games for linux. Hell, I'm so excited for Oculus Rift, but at this point they have even dropped Mac support (understandably, they don't have the graphics power), so if I want to experience VR currently, I'm completely limited to windows, not even playing indie and valve games on linux.
- ausjke 11y agoOne reason that I did not use Win10 so far(Windows 7 for Tax and the rest is Linux), to be fair, Microsoft is not alone doing this in the big-data-mining era.
- hellomc 11y agoI wouldn't use Windows (especially 8+) for anything other than superficial activities like gaming. It's a shame as Windows is more polished, but I miss the days when an OS was an inert thing you didn't have to think about (damn you Internet!).
- akerro 11y agoMakes me wonder how much other kind of data they didn't reveal...
- junto 11y agoComing next week... 75% of our users watch pornography at least twice a week. On average it takes 4.73 minutes for males between 28 and 33 years of age, with a household income of between $65-75k pa, who work in the advertising industry and who are married with 2 or more children and personal debt over $25k and at least one car, and a search phase of "mature big tits" to finish watching it.
- JustSomeNobody 11y agoI feel scroogled.
- skrebbel 11y agoI fully agree with the complaints, but I never understood why this outrage doesn't happen about e.g. Gmail (or all of ChromeOS for that matter). Lots of people virtually live in Google Apps, which certainly does a lot more tracking than Windows 10 does. The argument that "it's OK because it's on the web" just doesn't cut it anymore guys. An application is an application. We should just be as angry about browsers that do tracking and web apps that do tracking as we are about OS'es that do tracking.
- AlexandrB 11y agoI'm not happy about Gmail tracking, but the information Gmail has access to is limited to what ends up in that email account. An OS's access is potentially everything on the computer. To me, privacy is about control (deciding who gets to see what) and having an OS that phones home with who knows what information means I have no control once information touches my PC.
- caskance 11y agoAnyone who cares to look it up knows. Of course, there's always the chance that Microsoft is lying in their documentation, but if you mistrust them that much, you probably shouldn't use their software even if they claim to not collect any information.
- AlexandrB 11y ago> Anyone who cares to look it up knows. Last I looked Microsoft's privacy policy was vague enough that it could include almost anything and everything on a PC as well as whatever Windows can infer about your local network. > Of course, there's always the chance that Microsoft is lying in their documentation, but if you mistrust them that much, you probably shouldn't use their software even if they claim to not collect any information. You're right, at the end of the day it comes down to trust. Microsoft's behaviour in this case - making it hard to disable telemetry, being vague about collection details and unresponsive to questions - means that it's hard to trust them. In a hypothetical world where they were upfront with what was collected, responsive to questions, and allowed users to disable all data gathering easily the same feature set might be easier to swallow. Edit: I forgot to mention how aggressively Microsoft has been shoving Windows 10 down user's throat. I've had several non-technical friends end up with Windows 10 by mistake (and against their wishes) - another sign that Microsoft doesn't give a shit about users' wishes.
- FussyZeus 11y agoOpen source OSes look more and more attractive every day... I still haven't upgraded and I'm preventing the updates to 7 that add the telemetry nonsense, but I can't help feeling like I'm getting more and more watched every day.
- Aleman360 11y agoIn this thread: mostly web devs whose sites and apps definitely don't use analytics.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- ancymon 11y agoThere's DisableWinTracking GitHub project [1]. Wouldn't installing this software solve problem for those who don't want to be tracked? [1] - https://github.com/10se1ucgo/DisableWinTracking https://github.com/10se1ucgo/DisableWinTracking
- voltagex_ 11y agoYeah, no thanks: https://github.com/10se1ucgo/DisableWinTracking/issues/137 https://github.com/10se1ucgo/DisableWinTracking/issues/137
- dimman 11y agoFrom the MS blog mentioned I find this section, or how it's formulated, rather interesting and disturbing: "3. Advertising Data We Don’t Collect Unlike some other platforms, no matter what privacy options you choose, neither Windows 10 nor any other Microsoft software scans the content of your email or other communications, or your files, in order to deliver targeted advertising to you." Most people would read that as "MS doesn't scan your files, communication or email period" when it in fact just mentions one case in which they dont...
- bitwize 11y agoSometimes "scanning the content of your email or your files" is a desirable feature, for example in an antivirus program.
- imtringued 11y agoAnd that's okay as long as the data doesn't leave your computer.
- Terr_ 11y ago"But we WILL spy on everything you do to figure out if our untargeted advertisements are working, and to create detailed profiles which we could share with other companies who do send out ads..."
- gottam 11y agoIt's because they DO look through people's files for their own purposes. Example: https://blog.onedrive.com/onedrive_changes/ https://blog.onedrive.com/onedrive_changes/ > a small number of users backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings. I'm pretty certain they didn't get permission to look at their users movie collections or DVR recordings, they were just flagged for high usage and they went right in to see what those users were storing. For any form of data collection they do, it's a guarantee they're analyzing the outliers... in fact they're practically bragging about the fact they do.
- dantillberg 11y agoI spent my holiday break shifting my alignment 2 or 3 points towards Stallmanism. The existence/collection of statistics like this increase my confidence in that choice. Between Windows privacy craziness and Apple's continuing lockdown of OSX (I think that System Integrity Protection augurs an iOS-like walled-garden future for OSX), I recently switched all of my OSX/Windows/Ubuntu systems to Arch Linux; it takes some tweaking and setup and a bit of command line hacking, but it's really awesome to have all my machines doing my bidding -- I tell them what to run, when/what to update, and I'm in control of synchronizing settings/files between them. With Windows/OSX (and Ubuntu to a lesser degree, which I'd used previously), you can only kind of hope that it does what you want, and when it doesn't work, you kind of bang on it a bit to try and get it to change its behavior. All the while, the computer is doing a large number of things you don't really want it to do (what are all these processes? why is it connecting to x.y.domain.net? what data is it sending? why does it insist on trying to get me to log in to XXCloudY? I don't want to use that), but which you're kind of powerless to stop (aside from e.g. blocking connections with another physical network device), even if you knew what was happening. But you don't.
- dimman 11y agojoke Let's hope you won't get systemd'd now instead end joke
- tremon 11y agoIt's a sad state of affairs that these tags are perceived mandatory even here.
- solidninja 11y agoEven so, having systemd installed on your system is infinitely better from the perspective of software freedom than having Windows 10 installed.
- agentultra 11y agoI went the other way around. I started with your conclusions and have been migrating to the Apple ecosystem and am tempted to move to Windows. I had become tired of the dearth of issues that crop up to maintain an Arch desktop distribution. While the privacy collection issues should be addressed and be transparent to end-users I think open source is not the way to go for these devices. I'm tired of each device being an island. I like handing off calls from my phone to my laptop when I'm at work. It began frustrating me years ago when I couldn't just flick a few files off of my e-reader to a friend's phone despite the prevalence of available networks. Open-source, meanwhile, has struggled to provide a basic desktop environment to rival the best from five years ago. It's simply too much work without a paid, focused, and highly-skilled product team consisting of more than just developers. And they're still fighting the chicken-and-egg problem of user-adoption. I don't like the spyware "features," but I don't think I'll be going back to Linux any time soon and giving up all the great software I've come to depend on. I'm hopeful that people will find ways to invest in its development and find a way to introduce a competing product that is both secure, in the control of the user, and a delight to use -- able to integrate with a plethora of devices and, for the most part, just work.
- lewisl9029 11y agoI still can't imagine why Microsoft would think it's worth the bad publicity to not offer the option to disable telemetry, considering how few people tend to deviate from defaults in general, and how tiny a percentage of their users even care about privacy to begin with (evident from the commercial success of Windows 10). They've been getting so much goodwill for all the other great things they've been doing lately. It just seems downright foolish to squander all of that for a few extra basis points in their telemetry data from those rare few users who care about privacy but are forced to use Windows 10 anyways for whatever reason. Those who care about privacy but do have a choice in OS will simply avoid Windows 10 altogether because of the mandatory telemetry, which is telemetry data that they wouldn't be getting anyways. A certain percentage of these people could be Windows 10 users if it weren't for the mandatory telemetry. Would they really rather have people using other OSes, than having them use Windows 10 without giving them telemetry data? So many aspects of their position on this issue seems completely irrational to me.
- caskance 11y agoThey do offer those options. People would just rather complain that the free upgrade they got doesn't have features they want - but apparently not enough to actually pay for them.
- lewisl9029 11y agoI assume you mean the Enterprise version? Last time I checked that wasn't something individual consumers can just go out and buy. But regardless of that, from Microsoft's perspective, does it make any sense to not offer the option to disable telemetry on all versions? From what I see, all it's doing is giving them bad publicity while driving potential users away to other platforms. And for what? Probably a few basis points in telemetry data that won't even make a dent to the overall trends in their telemetry data.
- Aleman360 11y agoBecause telemetry is a key tool used to improve quality. What software dev doesn't think logs and crash dumps are useful?
- codingdave 11y agoThis is the one that worries me -- "More than four billion hours spent playing PC games" Tracking usage in Microsoft's own software is one thing. But for the OS to understand which 3rd party apps are games, and track hours spent on them has some deeper implications.
- witty_username 11y agoThey probably mean Windows Store apps in the game category.
- alkonaut 11y agoThat has to be a tiny fraction of the total hours, making it a pretty bad metric...
- personomas 11y agoPersonally, I love linux Mint. It beats every other operating system that I've every tried, but occasionally I've had to know some CS concepts in order to keep it running/ fix bugs. This is more a linux problem in general, but it's easily worth it as a CS student.
- justncase80 11y agoIs it really a privacy concern if its anonymous usage statistics? The word for it is telemetry and every medium sized app or bigger has been doing it for a really long time. What's the big deal?
- solidninja 11y agoWell, on one hand it's not a big deal because it's all the EULA and you've presumably read it and agreed it to it before booting up. On the other, it's a pretty big deal because I view my computers as extensions of my brain. And I view the ability to do things privately in my brain of paramount importance. Now, I understand why software builders like to build in telemetry (it allows them to tweak their products to be more popular and sell data to advertisers) but I cannot accept such a thing for a general-purpose operating system.
- EdSharkey 11y agoWindows 7 is the last version of Windows I'll run, Microsoft! The moment Ballmer switched from "Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers!" to "Advertisers, Advertisers, Advertisers, Advertisers!", I knew it was time to start migrating myself to Linux and Mac.
- mhuffman 11y agoWhen I saw that Microsoft started putting ads in the start menu, I began to seriously wonder if there isn't some sort of "Trading Places" type bet going on over there to see who can run the OS into the ground first! The messed up thing, is that they are getting such good press on their open-source initiatives and research projects, but really seem to be screwing themselves on the OS. Then again, maybe they know something I don't know, and we will see some resurgence of Windows somehow.
- scrollaway 11y agoMS was never about "Developers developers developers". They're more about that today than they have ever been before, in fact. What ballmer actually meant in his demented rage was "Developer lock in, Developer lock in, Developer lock in!". Linux is a million times friendlier to developers. The new MS is getting there, but the new MS also has its glaring flaws, like the ones being discussed here.
- Animats 11y ago"Cortana looks out for you." - the marketing version of "Big Brother is watching you". Just think of it as Microsoft Total Information Awareness.
- yuhong 11y agoOff topic, but I like to submit this: http://www.networkworld.com/article/2866286/microsoft-subnet/former-microsoft-chief-privacy-officer-on-the-cloud-conspiracy.html http://www.networkworld.com/article/2866286/microsoft-subnet... Of course, Caspar Bowden was fired years ago, but I have a feeling Satya probably only made this culture worse. I remember this for example too: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/12/ballmer-microsofts-cloud-revenue-numbers-are-bullshit/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/12/ballme...
- harigov 11y agoI think the newer agile software development process requires companies to focus more on monitoring rather than testing, in order to understand how software is being used and also to figure out what needs to be improved/fixed. Microsoft is just implementing such processes in their products just like every other company. We would be hypocritical to say that we can make use of that processes but not Microsoft, just because we say so. It's important to realize that this monitoring based software development approach is going to stick around, and we have better chances of coming up with some strict guarantees around how that data is used, protected and anonymized rather than not collecting data at all.
- ocdtrekkie 11y agoI would rather that while we realize we don't want Microsoft to do it to us, we shouldn't do it to others either. Golden Rule: If you don't want to be tracked, stop writing software to track others.
- username223 11y agoI remember a time when so-called "beta testers" would be given your broken software for free, in exchange for providing bug reports. Now I guess everyone gets your broken software, gets data-mined in arbitrary ways, and maybe the next step on the version treadmill makes things less awful.
- moonshinefe 11y agoDetails of usage tracking? What details? All I see are some vague statistics and some rhetoric about Microsoft "really really caring about your privacy, guys."
- Kenji 11y agoI don't understand the hate. Windows 10 is a great operating system and I am happy to use it. It is much more stable than Ubuntu Linux or any other OS I've ever used. "2.4 billion questions asked to virtual assistant Cortana" Things like that are really completely harmless. Microsoft already owns your ass by means of auto-updater (so does every vendor from which you download software updates) It is not time to be paranoid. As long as Microsoft keeps releasing quality products, they can anonymously track how long Windows users watch porn for all I care.
- mc808 11y agoI'm as cynical as they come, and that's still more than I thought they were actually collecting. Counting every picture viewed? Every minute spent in the browser? I was thinking along the lines of "unexpected shutdown".
- sireat 11y agoWhat is the best that you can do to minimize tracking on Win 10 pro? Just run that DisableWinTracking from Github?
- quantumpotato_ 11y agoYour options for "send details to M$oft" are "Basic, Enhanced or Full (Recommended)." Enhanced is selected by default. How thoughtful of them. No explanation. This is hostile computing.